


Triptych

by iconicscullyoutfits



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, MSR, Mulder is married AU, RST, Slow Burn, UST, otherwise canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:28:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 93,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26383369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iconicscullyoutfits/pseuds/iconicscullyoutfits
Summary: Vignettes and case files following Mulder and Scully through the first seven years of their partnership.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 179
Kudos: 366





	1. The Optics Jibed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These are set as vignettes across the seasons. Consider this my mad scientist's den in that I'm experimenting heedlessly, turned skyward in hope of a fortuitous blackened sky, an earth-bent bolt, and a bellowing, 'It's alive!'. All chapter titles are drawn from the poem 'My God, It's Full of Stars' by Tracy K. Smith.

Seven years from the supple arc of his neck under the slatted light of the moon, there would be the quiet space in her arms, and the braille of her skin under his scholar hands. How could they have known it all back then?

-

It had been easy. It had been like finding her way through a childhood home in the dark. In the throes of upheaval and the dizzying quantum bend that seemed in constant orbit of her untamed ally, she had let old habits lead her to his room, tied like a gift in a scanty, scarlet robe. But Mulder, a boy and a man, frantic, innocent, did not seem to recognise the offer she had made.

Instead, he was curled like a kid camper below her against the side of the bed, Scully laid out on his sheets above. He repaid her then in full, stripping down to less than skin – to the truth. She drank it in, rapt beyond belief. He told himself to her in pages, in a way she had not had in mind when – seized by a familiar pull – she had rushed to him, ready for ruin.

Revelation was sublime. Here was this strange man. He was gaping open, an exposed wound, carrying the terror of a lost girl in his eyes. It was not like what she knew. A Socratic Oath echoed and the doctor in her swelled before the fever of his pain. It would not be like before

By the night’s close, new laws were set in place. Scully hugged her robe around her throat, restless with looming apology as he lingered by her motel room door. He handed her his candle.

“I live in the dark, anyhow,” he said, embarrassed by the little charity.

Taking it, her fingers brushed over his wedding band. He retracted his hand, fiddled with the ring subconsciously, looking beyond her into the well of her bedroom.

“Mulder.” His eyes settled back on her, called down to the world. They were clear like water over stone, and just as cool, and gushing forth. He looked too much at her and the words petered away: “I shouldn’t have…”

Her glance fell involuntarily to the ring on his finger. Mulder bristled; she had broken a small code.

“We were just talking,” he shrugged. “And my wife’s not like that, she doesn’t mind.”

Scully laughed, the kind of laugh born from an old cry.

“What?” Mulder was smiling in anticipation of a joke. He was so much like a boy.

“Believe it or not,” she told him, fixing on his chin and feeling old as Time. “I’ve heard that line before.”

-

Months passed quickly in the thrill of it. Scully studied him in luxury, safeguarded by the knowledge that his marriage made him untouchable. It was easier that way, to catalogue him without the fear of getting caught up.

So far, the facts were this: he loved everything too much, even Missing-Link murderers in the back alleys of Jersey, and every single child on Earth. He was so easily charming and unintentionally endearing when the mood happened to strike, but so inescapably peculiar in all other regards, that he was ultimately hopeless at retaining in the long term any of the acquaintances he had charmed or endeared at first. More to the point, however, was that he had no desire to make friends. In total, he had just three cartoonish Guys-in-the-Chair, and a wife - the proto-Scully of The X-Files; the former cult were yet to grow on her fully, and the latter figure seemed a subject that neither Scully nor Mulder felt inclined to broach.

It was a miracle, in her mind, that he had found himself a wife at all. It seemed impossible that he had sustained an interest in anything outside his own mercurial grief and manic fixations for more than a few days at a time. He was a man of very sparse and concentrated interests, always awake, often restless, occasionally and abruptly divinely wrathful, but mostly arrestingly calm. And there was an outer breeziness to his nature on good days that did not make it overtly clear when or why he had admitted, without any thoughts on the matter, Scully into the exclusive ranks of his company.

So exclusive was his especial alliance, in fact, that he had told her as much. Not even the silhouette of a greying man walking into the mist of day had secured this privilege. _Scully, you’re the only one I trust._ It was a heavy bond. He adopted her and, with an equal absence of thought, she allowed herself to be adopted. Despite being the far more earth-bound and professional of the two, she had the sense already of being merely an essential partner in his mission rather than a co-captain on their co-assigned quest: he had let her in on a secret, but the secret was originally his.

Scully wanted to see through him, she wanted to bathe him, she wanted to carry him on her back. She wanted to listen to him monologue and she wished he would shut up half of the time. She wanted to hold a glass of water to his mouth and help him get to sleep. She wanted to be the holster for his gun. She wanted to beat him up for being so reckless and naive. She wanted to work with him no matter what. She wanted to protect him because he was a sensitive man. She wanted to throw her life on the line and to sit in the passenger side of his car on a lingering stake-out and listen to the crack of a sunflower seed beneath the mantle of the moon. She showed him over and over, and the growing vice of guilt was ever-matched by growing need. Even Mulder - lone fire in a cave - was getting used to it.

-

Mulder did not remember getting married. In the summer of ’91, he lost two weeks to a profiling case, a vacuum of memory, Diana holding his hand all the while, leading him into the dark. The reverse of Orpheus. Four girls and little dresses and a man drenched in vermillion. He had awoken on the other side of it in a coastal villa bed, a wedding ring and a woman’s limbs wrapped around him.

 _You worked that case brilliantly_ , she had poured over his skin. He’d lost 10 pounds. His hair was matted and he’d scratched the skin under the beard shrouding his face. _See what you accomplish when you let yourself go all in?_ Night by night, Diana made him know the sum of all her pride.

-

“Was my mother here?” Mulder asked, hazily, pinned beneath Diana in the musty gloom of their bedroom years later. “Her perfume.”

“That’s my perfume,” she hushed him, pressing her thumb to his lips. Mulder felt delirious.

“I feel sick,” he protested weakly.

“I’ve been in London a fortnight. I missed this.” Her voice was soothing and unrelenting.

“I want some water. I feel sick. Diana, let me up.”

She moved over him insistently, silencing him with a kiss. She ran her thumbs over the sheen of his brow, down towards the necklace over his chest. Without breaking her muzzle on his fumbling mouth, she flipped the cross upside down on its chain, spilling Scully out.

Mulder jolted up, wresting her hand away. He ran to the sink and dry heaved, propped up by the tripod of his shaking arms. The cross was upright again, resting over his heart. Diana’s arms were roping around him from behind soon enough, pulling at the wisps on his chest.

He turned to face her, feeling like lead, and so light – as light as air.

“I got tested for HIV,” he said suddenly, because he didn’t care. The fever reached his bones. He was rattling like death. “I’m waiting on results.”

Diana met him with a tested, restrained air, like sentient marble pretending to be a statue.

“Was it with a Ken or a Barbie?” she said, like he was a child.

Mulder fought the fever down but it was sawing through his spine and his arterioles.

“You knew?” he shivered, feeling sick again.

“Give me some credit, Fox. What am I, a schoolteacher?” She looked cold in anger, but at least she was angry. It felt good to be shamed. He was a dog keening after a boot. Mulder followed her dimly back towards the bed. Some days their age difference was a cavernous divide. “You’re not the only professional in this house. So you lost someone the same way you lost your sister, someone you clearly have some kind of quasi-incestuous compulsion towards, and you drown her out in cheap videos and call-girls while I’m away and when that doesn’t work, you spend yourself on some reckless one night stand, half hoping you’ll either dirty yourself clean or otherwise contract a lethal virus and be put out of your ongoing misery? Is that right?”

“Cut the psychobabble, Freud,” he attempted, but his body betrayed him with a shudder and he slumped down on the bed. She loomed over him, glowing with disdain. She was not usually like this, but then again neither was he. He was hurtling his body against it, rabid, shivering. The granite of her could not be scathed.

“God, Fox, what is wrong with you? Your issues with your sister, I can understand. At least that, you utilise productively. But this? You used to have bite in you. You were a live wire. How long did you even work with her? A year? You aren’t her family. You were barely even friends. In fact, from what I gather, her family is handling it better than you. Be honest with yourself, what right do you have to grieve for her this way? It’s embarrassing for me. Have you considered that?”

“How do you know anything about her family?” His lungs were swimming in his ribs. “Who are you talking to?”

“She was a hindrance to your work, Fox, work that I share an investment in, work that I have only ever supported you through. The X-Files are mine too, and now you’re throwing it to the wayside over a fresh-faced girl who probably lied about her age to get the job. Ever since her assignment, it’s been one bureaucratic land-mine after another. You think that’s a coincidence?”

“No, she wasn’t with them. She had my back-”

“I have your back, Fox. I have your house keys, your bed, your name in my will. You want to let your grief out on somebody, to throw your body into the ring and bleed it out? Come to me and I’ll deliver the blow. I am your wife. And dammit, I was your partner once and not so long ago.”

A tremor seized him and he remembered Scully’s blood wet on the floor, Scully bound inside a trunk, Scully’s hands soft on his neck, Scully appearing in the jungle, bringing him home, by the hospital bed, putting herself on the line, whispering something to him.

“I’m so tired.” He could not get warm. Scully would have gotten him a blanket by now. “What day is it?”

Diana moved towards him, sighing wearily.

“Lay down, Fox.” She pressed him into the mattress, resuming her position over him.

“The test-” he said, dizzy. His head was sinking through the pillow and the mattress and the floor and the crust of the blue Earth.

"You’re negative,” she said, untying his drawstrings. He wanted it, he wanted something, the blackened flux of his want, Diana would know how to crystallise and quench. “The results came in the mail today.”

Then it was happening before he knew which country he was in, and in the throes of it, she leaned down breathlessly: “Take off the necklace.”

Mulder swam through the fog of his life and realised he had been grasping Scully’s cross in his right hand. His left hand was being commandeered by Diana to perform tasks of old routine. Impatient, and nearing the precipice, Diana reached behind his neck to unclasp the delicate chain herself and suddenly Mulder came alive and flipped her over, and the necklace fell to hang over her face, swaying and glinting like a scythe in the dim light from outside, and it was her, Scully, brandished bright between them, an angel aflame warding off foreign and unclasping hands. The amber streetlight filtered in to douse Diana’s young and grieving husband in a midnight gold. He glowed like embers, his hair cast down and around his face in the image of a wrathful halo’s fire, his eyes lit to the green of God, and were she a woman of the religious bent, she might have thought him possessed by the spirit of the Holy Ghost or – god forbid – by love.


	2. We Learned New Words for Things

The heavens opened and let a feather loose to carve its way through air and settle back on earth, flushed and glowing with fatigue in a mundane hospital bed. Scully’s return switched on all the lights in his house, pressed play on every movie, set off the cuckoo clocks of the world. She insisted on starting work right away and if he were a less superstitious man, he might have tried in earnest to prolong her convalescence; but as it was, he had a strong suspicion that to spend even a moment in reflection on the few months past would snap the golden thread of motion which had reanimated life. There was only tomorrow and the next case and driving in one direction and rushing down hallways with a second pair of footsteps by his side. There were only constant and panicked consultations of a silent _are you okay?_ and a breathless nod, saying _yes, yes, don’t worry, keep moving_. He took to her this time like an amputee to a prosthetic limb. There was no question about how things were different. In her abduction, something had been taken from her, and she had been taken from him, and neither could allow the repeat of so huge a loss. She was softer, air-brushed, hyper-vigilant, and quieter around death like a child after a beating. He was softer too, and shrouded her like mist over a lake.

-

Two things had changed since Diana last saw her husband: one, she knew she could not leave him; and two, she realised it might not have occurred to Mulder that he could end things himself.

She was seated in shadow on his couch when he arrived home. He let his hiking pack slump onto the floor, dropped his suitcase at the threshold and tossed his keys on the kitchen bench, lumbering towards the fridge in the dark. Diana watched him rummaging through a paucity of long-life beverages which would have made even Mother Hubbard weep, like he was a raccoon pilfering the rubbish of his own impermanence. His ignorance to her presence was the most romantic she had felt in years. Removed, she longed for of him.

“How was Oregon?”

He spun around, wielding the milk carton in his hand like a bat. The only light was the fluorescence of the whining refrigerator, which lit him from below like a ghost-story teller. “Jesus, Diana! You trying to land me in the cardiac ward?”

“You shaved, cut your hair,” she said, standing then and moving very slowly through the space between them so as not to startle the cover of darkness. Last she’d seen him, he’d been feverish and possessed and cruel and impenetrable, and she’d been so locked out from her own barren, receding life that no wounds they inflicted could draw forth any blood. He’d been unbearable in grief. “It looks good.”

The refrigerator beeped in distress. Mulder jumped at the noise and let the door swing closed, plunging them into blackness, under the cloak of which Diana brought herself to be standing only a few feet away. There was a single shaft of light from the window across his face, and his eyes were blank and shining like a cat’s.

“You been hackin’ packs?” he asked, frowning slightly at the smell.

“Must have been my ride from the airport,” she said easily. “The cab reeked of cigarette smoke. I read your case report on the Firewalker case. It’s good to see you’re back on the horse.”

“I wasn’t sure you were getting my emails.”

“I always have an interest in your work.”

“You would have liked this case,” he said, in a tone that was not a tone but a recording of civility. “Real pieces o’ work, all of ‘em. And that fungus; I know you like a good bit of phallic symbolism.”

“This Trepkos character certainly won your sympathies,” she said, watching him. He was like a flint stone; the trouble was striking him across the right surface in the right way. “An obsessive pioneer with his heart in the right place, delivering a bright young woman innocently devoted to his cause right into the arms of death.”

He sparked. She felt an old satisfaction at hitting the mark.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” he said shifting uncomfortably. A moment settled and the continental drift of the years groaned in tectonic shift between them. He softened dependably. “Diana…”

She moved into him at last. The great whale of inevitability opened its yawning mouth and the two of them let time and history draw them inwards in that heaving gush of the ocean, down with a million krill towards the belly of the beast. After a moment, he placed his hands on her shoulders and held her firmly away, half-an arm’s length from him.

“I owe you an apology.”

“It’s forgotten.” He would drag this out, she knew. If she could, she’d go to bed with him and put it to rest, but the confusion in those tragic child-eyes of his made it clear that flesh and bed linen would not suffice this time.

“It shouldn’t be.”

God, the energy he took. He was an ever-weeping wound.

“You’re making this personal.”

“It is personal.”

“No. Listen, Fox, I want you to remember something. You and I, we’re the kind of people who know one thing, and that’s the job. We knew that coming into this. The job always comes first. I admire that about you. For a few months, she was the job, your partner. Now she’s back. Whatever hindrance I believe her to be, you are clearly the kind of person who needs a partner in order to function optimally, and since I’m the one who left The X-Files, I suppose I have no right to complain. In my opinion, she is holding you back, but I know you – you get attached, and the vampiric case you worked in her absence was disastrous, to say the least, on both a personal and professional level. You need her? Fine. You have her back. I don’t want an apology, not even for infidelity because it wasn’t about me, it was about the job. I know you, Fox. Remember that. I knew you first. None of the rest is personal.”

Mulder studied her, soaking in their lot. His countenance had a resting glow which she had come to recognise as a side-effect of the girl – Agent Scully. Her return had set Mulder back in orbit, but his course seemed saner, softer than before. After a moment, he dropped his hands from Diana’s shoulders and nodded at his feet, accepting the reality of love as she had laid it out for him. He brushed past her and disappeared into the inkiness of their neglected bedroom, where she would follow eventually and let him spend his guilt on her in the dark so that he could keep it to himself, she hoped, during daylight hours. She knew what bringing up Trepkos would do, and she was only reminding him of what bound them together, what he already knew; they deserved only this much.

Two things made it so that Diana could not leave her husband: the first was a devil’s deal she’d made with a silhouette of power and tar which had left its tell-tale scent on her; and the second was that, when she had been alone in London and gone to the greasy window of her shoebox hotel room, looked out onto the grey cement of an overcast sky over a sea of foreigners who would not have batted an eyelid at seeing her corpse on the road, it occurred to her that Mulder was the only person in the world who would attend her funeral, and that – here were the dismal facts – he was the one real good thing alive.

-

Scully understood the rule about Wives. They were not to be mentioned. Also not to be mentioned; the insult of furtive meals shared in lonesome Edward-Hopper-esque diners past midnight out of town, the seedy motel rooms with bedspring creaks out of a Looney Tunes sound effects cupboard, the insular reality of not sharing social lives outside of intense rendezvous. With Mulder, these were the facts of the job. It just so happened that even innocent professionalism rang bells of illicit old affairs. Diana was not to be mentioned all the same.

Once, after a profiling case like something out of the nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe in which Mulder’s old professor played the part of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde turned pathetic, Scully had brought Diana up casually as they were readying to leave the basement office.

“You look better today, Mulder,” she’d said. He was helping her into her coat from behind. He swept his right hand down from her shoulder to rest lightly over her hip, shepherding her to the door. In the elevator, they both nestled in the corner, making space for more people they both knew would not enter. “If I’m being honest,” she continued, in a rush of reckless curiosity, “I hate what profiling does to you. I can’t imagine how Diana deals with it.”

He stiffened and she knew she’d transgressed a fragile rule.

“She knows how I work,” he answered stiffly. “She helps me go deeper, actually. If she hadn’t been overseas consulting, I might have cracked this case sooner and one less person would be dead.”

The elevator pinged open to the parking lot and they stepped out in silence.

“Of course,” she said, searching for words of remediation, pressed by familiar guilt. “She worked with you for years.”

Mulder kept silent as he walked her to her car, a habit he’d adopted since events with Pfaster had burned themselves into the growing catalogue of things fuelling their insomniac leanings. At her car, she lingered, watching her hand on the door handle, watching it sit.

“Mulder,” she said, addressing her knuckles. He was hovering close beside her. She did not want to go home. “You want to grab a bite? I’ve got frozen lentil mush awaiting me at home and I could really do with some pad Thai.”

Venturing a look upwards, she saw the dance of low lights in his eyes. There was always a laugh in the stooped tenderness of him. Whatever passing rigidity, there was the self-effacing, gentle laugh.

“I know a place,” he told her, speaking low. There was always someone listening. “Just out of the neighbourhood, but not a long drive. You can follow my car. Look, Scully, I’m tellin’ you, if these noodles can’t get you believe in the supernatural, then not even a happy birthday card from a little green Martian named Zygon will.” Satisfied with the shielded laugh this absurdity obtained, he tapped her arm and left to his own car, beaming softly at his own hilarity.

The rules: no Diana, and only out of town dinners. But Mulder was not like Waterson, Scully understood. It was not that he did not want to be seen with her; it was that he did not want to be looked at while being seen by her. The reprieve of privacy between them was at once illicit and sublime, and ever scarcer a resource, the more attention they garnered from the Eyes of the world.

The Eyes of the world were upon them constantly. A barrage of Eyes; the Eyes of retail workers and cell-phone radiation, the Eyes of speed cameras and tapped landlines, of taxes and car registrations, of cash registers and race riots, of fingerprints and Greenpeace, of their past selves and their future needs, of public transport and scratched VCRs, of their self-judgements and a wandering passer-by, of shame, of money, of the landlord, of the government, of missing evidence, of cover-ups, of shifting shadows and the men to whom they belonged, of genetics, of priests, of old friends and sensibility and passwords and tomorrow and tomorrow and the silent rules of acting like a member of society. The Eyes of the world were watching. Mulder, man in a tin-foil hat, took assault at being seen, and ever since Melissa’s murder in cold blood by daft, unseeing hands, Scully had been just as irately paranoid. Safety off, locked in on every watching thing.

Looking back, it had been Missy’s death actually which had cemented her slow fuse into Mulder, mired in the quicksand of culpability and grief. She honed herself down to bare essentials; love and anger. There was no way out but through. There was no way through but together. Together, always together, backs flush, scoping the circling defeat of apathetic and moneyed impunity in the looming shadows of power. They were the sole lifeline of truth. They traded words with each other. _Learn to speak my language._ They interwove philosophies, caught each other’s trains of thought, interchanged beliefs at will, and lay brick by brick the foundations of their two-man retreat.

All this was a project, training themselves in each other for the job, sewing themselves into each other’s seams, hybridising in a pseudo-hermaphroditic feat. Two halves of a unicellular being. They were not one thing, but they were, chromatids able to meiotically detach and reattach at will, the way dolphins can swim for hours underwater before rejoining vitally with air.

The leaden crush of a warmer need against her sternum occasionally and the neglect endured by her receptive skin under the heat of his fell second to the job. She needed to work to stay alive, and she could no longer conceive of a life beyond this work. She needed The X-Files in a new, unending way. What it meant that Mulder and The X-Files were one and the same thing was not a question she felt either of them were prepared to pose.

Instead they touched each other under tables, a knee against a swaying thigh; they stood slotted into each other, tessellated like the wings of an albatross; they whispered sweet nothings of conspiracy and banal theories of death and injustice and all that was enough. Fumes to sustain a black sedan hurtling down the highway of one inexorable choice after another, to the end.


	3. Perhaps the Great Error

Dana first observed the great beauty of a dignified woman’s grief when she was still a year off from starting elementary school. Margaret Scully was watching the sea of the Atlantic carry away the pillar of her family, settling into a patient loneliness as weightless and encompassing as the ocean mist which then enveloped her form. There was a marine calm to her sacrifice. She wore it like her husband wore the medals he brought home. For some women, to endure was their life’s career. Dana observed all this is in the lilac self-possession of her mother’s solitude. She had the strange sensation that her father was a pearl diver and that when he plunged into the deep, her mother was the one holding her breath.

Margaret bid farewell to the mistress horizon, then crouched down to take her middle child’s bespeckled pillow cheeks within her hands, hands which were built exactly for purpose of wiping away tears with the discerning warmth of her thumb.

“Aren’t you going to cry?” Dana asked, suddenly inflamed at the betrayal of her own overflow. Her mother was the model of her father’s expectation, the embodiment of his every magnanimous and exacting order, so Dana knew – if her mother’s eyes were dry, then to cry was a failure. Maggie’s hands were forgiving, sweeping the wild fray of her youngest daughter’s hair back behind her ears, a fruitless battle against the wind and humidity. She smoothed the crease in Dana’s indignant brow with a kiss.

“Why should I cry, sweetheart?” she said, and a part of her was adrift with him always. “When he comes home, it’s to me. That’s all, if nothing else.”

_

“I heard you pulled a gun on my husband,” were the fitting first words Diana Fowley spoke to Mulder’s partner of three years. More fitting yet, Scully received them from a hospital bed, wherein she was recovering from subliminally induced psychotic paranoia, and a mental and emotional breakdown so spectacularly absolute that it had no doubt made front-page of the FBI’s gossip bulletins. And here was Diana, appearing as if by design of humiliation’s plans, her dignity rendering her taller than what pictures could convey. She smiled like a professional. “From what I hear, it’s become somewhat of a ritual.”

“Everybody needs a secret handshake,” Mulder supplied from Scully’s bedside. He smiled and stood to greet his wife, but from the chaste peck he anointed on her expectant lips and the look askance he made in Scully’s direction, Scully gathered that this visitation was of equal surprise and embarrassment to them both. A moment hung; the three adults were aware of some unspoken conflict in supply and demand of a thing belonging to none and all of them at once. Mulder, the world’s first gentleman, clapped his hands together, rupturing silence with, “You must be flat as a pancake, Di, straight from the airport. I’ll grab coffee. None for you Scully. Jitters, and all.” With that, he made his swift traitor’s egress. 

“Agent Scully.” Diana turned to appraise Scully officially now that the women were alone. There were some things men could not be party to, some things their presence blindly dispelled. Diana remained standing and polite and Scully repositioned herself to be as upright as possible within the swimming sheets of her sterile confinement. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“I’m afraid that puts me at a disadvantage,” Scully rejoined, meeting her gaze. Camera lenses captured the grace of a black cat, but comparison to a raven was more truthful to the reality. Diana’s intelligence was violet and obscure and behind her dignity she was watchful, processing. Scully respected her.

“I’ll take that to mean Fox neglects to mention me at work. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“He respects your privacy.”

“Ah. He talks about you all the time, like a blood-brother.”

“Well,” Scully said, looking down, forfeiting. Blood-brother. She was successfully neutered. “We’ve been through a lot.”

“I suppose that makes two of us.”

A lull in their mimicry of a conversation crept into the room; the veils momentarily faltered. Were it not for the knowledge that Scully might have still been suffering the lingering after-effects of hallucinatory suspicion, she might have felt an uneasiness about the woman who had come before her in every regard. Diana was formidable. There was piercing insight in her air, and something unforthcoming about the coolness of her eye. Scully had the feeling of being assessed up close by someone who had watched her for a lifetime from afar.

On a baser level came something territorial. An image of Mulder arose, beside himself on the bank of an icy river, breathing life into a bluish girl with all the desperation and belief of a man too good to survive the well of his own grief. _Where were you?_ came a possessiveness which had no legal grounds. _While I was lying to save his life, starving a blood-soaked fever in my bed, making deals with blue devils to avenge him, sitting by his frozen body in Alaska for eight days without a change of clothes, pulling his body off a drowned child and letting him beat the fists of his sorrow against me – where were you?_

 _Does it matter?_ the levelness in Diana’s poise answered easily. _When he comes home, it’s to me. That’s all, if nothing else._ Scully knew then, the depth of her mistake; she had been here before.

Later, before he left, Mulder took her hand firmly in his own, friendly and sincere. He parted with one of his small, nodding smiles and a squeeze. Blood-brother. She thought of her father patting the backs of men on deck before striding off the boat and down the jetty into her mother’s arms – her mother, who had said to her earlier that morning when they were alone, “Dana, last night…I felt like a piece of paper between two sites of nuclear fallout.” Maybe they just needed each other to survive. It sounded something grand, but every case came to an end and then it wasn’t much at all.

_

Dana Scully had emerged from pre-med exhausted to the bone of her mounting perfection. Every holiday, returning home, her father glowed perpetually with naval, reticent pride, like a government greeting its soldiers back from war. On campus, her peers found her somewhat impressive and distinctly Catholic in a way that made her feel constantly like that carrot-haired girl in the forests of Maryland, trying to rough herself up against the brambles enough to run amongst the boys. Her roommate droned on incessantly; “I liked you better when you had awful, streaked hair and too much make-up and deafening taste in music.” That kohl-smeared rebellion had lost its thrill after the brief delectable cortisol of Ahab’s purple-faced response; then she had felt like a girl all over again.

Boys didn’t react well to her behind closed doors; thus crystallised, like a slow rot, the inner kernel of what she began to see as lurking perversity. The worst was Reece, a blazing atheist who zeroed in on her at a frat party like the devil landing upon an unlocked nunnery. Dana got the sense he wanted to ‘ruin’ her, and it had been her indignation at that assumption of girlish purity which led her to be leaning over the cup-holder in his car, parked outside an empty diner, grappling with him in a frosty, old sedan.

“Jesus, calm down,” he’d hissed suddenly. There was reproach in his surprise. She felt the sudden horror of her needs and asked him to drive her home. Even the ones who wanted her to be bad, wanted her to be good.

Medical school arrived and Dana gave up on her peers. She had one friend, Sandy, a quiet, blonde Australian, “Yes, just like in Grease,” who she suspected was slightly in love with her, but it was safe; neither of them would ever make the first move. Mostly, she kept to herself. She studied medicine the way soldiers trained in physical combat. Boys left her alone. They sensed a tiredness in her, one breath from recklessness.

The Whipple Procedure could take up to twelve hours. Professor Daniel Waterson gave a lecture on it in less than two. He stood upright and had the lean finesse of academic lineage. He gave Dana a surreptitious touch at the elbow as she moved past his lectern on her way out. She stayed back, taking orders quietly.

“Your paper,” he began, once the lecture hall was empty. He had looked towards the exit three times already, and still not once at her. “I’d forgotten science could be brazen.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He laughed then, and finally turned the discernment of his gaze upon her: “I didn’t say it was good. Frankly, it’s more of an indictment of the ineffectual, nepotistic state of research than a literature review on the gateway theory of pain. Opinion needs evidence. Bring me something robust.” Dana waited for further instruction, but Waterson was gathering his notes, tapping them against the lectern officiously. “That’s all,” he said, sliding bifocals up his literary nose. She felt he was distinctly not looking at her body.

She locked herself up in the barracks of research all night, all week, and with the same dead seriousness she’d employed in charting boat trips for her father as a girl, reassessing everything under the scrutiny of his eye. But the illicit warmth she derived from obeying Waterson was the most unlike a woman her father would recognise that she had felt in years. The troops were in private mutiny.

It was safe. He was married, and that made it safer. His wife was a mental chaperone. Dana derived satisfaction enough from the furtiveness of their meetings in his office, wherein they discussed her work over coffee and chaste academic repartee. He was a demanding man, daunting in his expectation of faultless acumen. She felt that he had seen a hidden thing in her. He had seen her dignity, which was not like the oceanic sweep of her mother’s, but flaming and restrained in all its ire. She felt, thank god, that he would be disappointed by the good girl act she hated and was trapped by elsewhere. It was liberating to be treated like a threat: the seductiveness of her unsafe mind, of her young body beside his. 

It began with his hand brushing the inside of her knee under his desk.

“You have a daughter my age,” she noted, as a last resort.

“You have a father mine.”

“You’re married,” she shot back, indignant as ever, perhaps trying to save herself, perhaps attempting to gain a little of the upper hand. He gazed upon her like a king being cursed by a serpent or a sorceress or both. He breathed, “What are you doing to me?” She kissed him, to escape her father, to prove something to Freud, to ruin her own life, and because she wanted to, she needed to, and miraculously, he wanted her to need it.

When it was all over, she told only Missy. She was young and so, so old. She fled. Never again. She cut her hair, joined the FBI, turned herself into a gun, dressed like Katharine Hepburn or in standard uniform, spoke less, watched more, and learned to navigate the silent code of men.

_

Schnauz was dead before Mulder knew what he had done. Right in the howlers. He’d never thought of himself as a good shot. His body went to Scully, standing over her uselessly, the both of them quiet and panting as she scrambled to unbind her wrist from the chair.

“Are you hurt?” There was a dead man in the corner. Scully was shaking badly, winded, wincing at the assault of light spilling through the broken door. Mulder remembered his body beating against it. “Somebody call an ambulance!” No one was listening. Schnauz was dead. Mulder had not killed him dead enough. Scully, Scully was shaking and alive. Mulder reached through worlds towards her. Her hand was in his and their thumbs were firm over each other’s pulse. The look she gave him was not warm or grateful as he pulled her up and she said nothing. She moved past him, a spectre of fury and disembodiment, moving in a daze towards the exit mouth of hell. Blinking, empty, holding her hand up against the onslaught of the sun, she stepped back into the world of the living and the vile. There was a dead man in the corner and a smoking gun in Mulder’s hand.

Hours later, he found himself sitting upright in a drab motel room somewhere in the outskirts of Traverse City, Michigan. A phone was ringing, and he checked the weight in his right hand only to find a pistol. With some effort, he wrenched himself from the abyss of the armchair in which he had miraculously fallen asleep, although his circadian habits were more akin to falling unconscious every few days than sleeping. His fingers were cramped around the gun and he pried them loose in time to pick up his screaming cell phone from the nightstand and flop onto the bed with a groan.

“Mulder, it’s me.” He jolted up under the defibrillator of her voice. “I need you to pick me up from the hospital.”

“I thought- Are you hurt?”

“No,” she said briskly, hushed over the line, and it was clear she didn’t want to discuss it over the phone.

He met her in the emergency drop off zone, and she was a lighthouse on the kerb. A nervous part of him wanted to make a joke like, _Hey, baby, need a ride?_ but the larger part of him was still and quiet as she slumped into the car with him, locking the door immediately. She looked down at her hands. Mulder felt the uncertainty of his silence make a pest of itself, and Scully saved him the embarrassment by clearing her throat in a gaze-averted signal for him to put some pressure on the pedal and get them out of there.

They drove for five minutes in total silence, Mulder focusing on swallowing quietly and the hum of the car and the searching penetration of the headlights through the midnight emptiness of asphalt stretched before them. 

“Scully, he didn’t-” Mulder attempted, glancing between her and the road repeatedly. “None of the other women…he never- You’re alright aren’t you?”

She nodded, small nods down at her hands. She was running one of her thumbs over her palm; Mulder wondered distantly if she could read the story of her life in there before remembering that she didn’t believe those kinds of things. Her hair was hanging forward in a copper gleam across the side of her face. 

“It’s not the first time I’ve woken up with no idea where my body has been,” she said, finally. “I just needed to know for certain. I’ve been denied certainty too many times before.”

Mulder had one hand at nine o’clock on the wheel, his elbow propped up on the sill; the other, resting on the gear stick, tightened audibly. He felt Scully’s line of sight shift to the white of his knuckles. She was still in observation for a long while and then, in all her temperate mystery, moved to place her hand on his, loosening it with care. She pulled it into her lap and held him lightly there, both of her thumbs running arches over the dorsum of his hand, inspecting it in the slow way only the life-giving powers of a healer’s hands could do.

“Is this your shooting hand?” she asked, barely audible. He understood, nodded carefully. She lowered his hand to rest lightly over her thigh. Her thumbs continued in their warm ministering. “Pain makes monsters of men,” she continued, and her voice was far away. “I was thinking of Schnauz. He wasn’t a grown man, Mulder. I looked at him and I saw a boy scared for his life. He felt his fate was inescapable and I believed him in the moment. I understood that the child in him truly felt he had no choice but to kill me to survive. Faced with that, I thought…maybe pain outgains us. Maybe there’s only so far we can run from what the world has given us no choice but to become. And then I thought of you, and the child in you, and strange enough it gave me hope.”

Her head was reclined against the seat now, and she was facing him as through a dream, the passing streetlights illuminating the gloss of her eyes to be light, dark, light…His own hand was warm over her thigh, his thumb moving perilously across the fabric of her skirt. She was holding him in place, calm and mythical. He did not know where he was going.

“Hope?” he asked, his voice heavy in the well of his throat.

“The world has not always been kind to you, Mulder,” she said pointedly. He looked to her then, saw the serious affection in her eyes. This was her absolution - for the man that he had killed, rubbing the blood from his hand, pressing it to the life it had helped save, beating and alive and aware of some small tenderness in him.

“I believe compassion is a choice,” he said. “Maybe a difficult one; more difficult for some than for others. But it has to be a choice. It can’t be something that the world takes from you without alternative.” 

The road carried them forth. It was so easy when they were alone. They withdrew the way planets do; faster and further away from all other bodies, retreating into a cosmic isolation at the pull of the expanse.

“Mulder,” she whispered. They were in exodus. “I’ve listed you as my emergency contact. If anything happens to me, I want my mother to hear it from you.”

“You’ve been my emergency contact for years.”

“I know,” she said quietly, watching his hand on her leg. He opened and closed it lightly, like a cat’s scratch. Her head fell back against the seat and her eyes fluttered closed. Somewhere a child was seeing the ocean for the first time.

Mulder found himself pulling into the motel parking lot and hated himself for auto-piloting so well. He dragged them to a slow halt, turned off the engine with his unpossessed hand. The night spilled into silence around them. 

“Let’s stay in the car a moment,” Scully said to him lightly. Her eyes were still closed, the slim highway of her neck exposed in the light. Mulder felt the poise of a diver on the ledge.

“This cab charges by the minute,” he whispered. Scully laughed despite herself, dropping her head forward in that disbelieving way. He was smiling helplessly. “You’re the only smart person I know who thinks I’m funny.”

“I think you’re absurd,” she said without pause.

“Absurd is the life we lead, eh Sculls?”

She laughed again, this time a humourless puff of breath and a tired jump of her brows.

“You know, Mulder,” she said. He was still opening and closing his fingers over the warmth of her thigh. Scully blinked relaxed and drowsy under the rhythm of it, her breath coming slower and deep. “I used to think of ‘the inevitable’ and have premonitions of a family and a home and a front porch. Now…I have no idea how I’d get myself that life. The before and after seems clear, but the inbetween is mostly implausible. Look at us, look at what we’re doing. In the middle of some scrapheap of a town, ending up on both sides of a gun every other week. I don’t think about it often. I suppose part of me used to expect it would just happen by osmosis or the natural laws of physics or, I don’t know…and another part of me thinks that if it doesn’t just happen to me, then it might not happen at all. I’d just carry on this way. And lately that’s what seems inevitable.”

“You said yourself, Scully. It’s a choice.”

She opened her eyes to look at him then, pinning him easily. She was a powerful thing. Her eyes flickered to the glint of the wedding band on his left hand, which lay loosely over the wheel.

“I guess you and Diana are case and point of that choice. An alternative to being alone, even with a job like this.”

He frowned. “Scully, you’re…you’re not alone.”

They searched each other for a moment, and whatever insulation they entered dissipated rapidly. She patted his hand and dropped her gaze, stepping out from the car.


	4. If We Teeter at Some Ledge

Later, she remembered Mulder begging her to marry him. 1991: two weeks of profiling, like Kubrick’s Odyssey man in the vacuum of space, and he’d come home to her, drenched and innocent in his own boy sweat saying, “I gotta have something to hold on to.” Diana had never thought of herself as a romantic. She was the sound of a hooded man sauntering through cemetery fog. His despair was flattering. She thought of men fettered by prison balls being thrown off cliffs, jerking their sea-logged bodies upwards against an immutable drag. Their panic was a waste. Down at the ocean floor, it was quiet and there were no dead girls or men with mommy issues living noisily inside his eggshell head. Down there, she was waiting for him, watching him kick and slog for the surface. “ _I need someone_ ,” he kept saying. She thought, _Maybe we can help each other. I could be a weighted gyve._

1996: he was still kicking, straining his loping body against mouldy binds in a damp Russian gulag. The videotape glitched and its sound quality was little more than static fuzz, but Diana heard Mulder howling. She was in a basement far away, always far away; watching him in the dark, always in the dark. There was a man behind her who’d seen presidents die. She wondered if presidents went down with half as much fight as her cosmonaut husband.

“Agent Scully has been taken into custody,” said the king-killer. His voice was remarkably like a weasel’s, and Diana found it lessened his sway considerably, like finding out a skeleton had the tenor of a bratty child. He’d do better to keep the puckering flesh of his mouth shut. He spoke slowly, in love with his own omniscient remove. “She’s being held in contempt of Congress, a misled attempt at valour on her part. Those two would go to the ends of the Earth for each other in the name of loyalty. I think they’ve convinced themselves they’re actually helping each other, maybe even the world. You know as well as I do, Agent Fowley, there are no ‘ends of the Earth’, only shadows so absolute they seem like the end. In there – in that thankless obscurity – is where real heroism lies. Therein lies the invisible hand of history, unrecognised.”

On the screen, Mulder screamed as the molecular blackness of a billion years poured into each belligerent orifice. Diana looked away. She felt a cold hand on her shoulder, the knighthood of a reaper with tar-stained fingers.

“Bear witness, Agent Fowley,” he said. “Does a strong mother look away from the vaccination of her child? Did God look away from the drownings of Noah’s flood?” There was the sound of a lighter, a brief glow, and the hiss and snap and pull of a bad habit in her ears. Cigarette smoke in a basement, fog in a cemetery. “Yes, it’s a lonely, thankless endeavour,” he crooned, “beyond the edge of things.”

Later, when she saw the pictures of her husband wrapped around Agent Scully in the middle of a courtroom, flipping the bird to Congress in a show of blazing camaraderie, she remembered that the book Peter Pan had given her nightmares as a child. Something about the lone figure at the window, barred eternally from a joy towards which he could not aspire.

Later, when he called her to say he was alive and that he missed her and that she would not believe what he had seen but that he could not tell her over the phone, she remembered Mulder when she’d first met him. He’d seemed wild with possibility. To be pinned beneath the searchlight of his gaze was dizzying and irritating and life-giving and suffocating and too much all at once. He saw lights in the sky, heard ghosts in his heart, believed in stories only children were wise enough to know were true. 

Later, much later, when she knew it was all over, she wished for a moment she could have made him understand what she had done; perhaps she might have saved herself. But if he'd understood, he wouldn’t have been Fox Mulder, man alone on the moon.

Later, she saw she had been walking calmly towards the inescapable.

Later, in the end, she knew love was lonely work.

-

He was so fucking proud of her and she was so completely bowled over by the sheer ridiculousness of him and his audacious sheepishness and he was walking into the room towards her, smiling like an outlaw with a heart of gold. The gavel sounded and Scully flew to him at last. She had been waiting to go to him from the moment he’d walked in like a king from Babylon. He swept her into his triumphant arms and he was all over her, rubbing her back in front of strangers and whispering insane things about holding her and having all his limbs. When he pulled back, the glow on his face was too much - she fought the urge to salute him. Men in suits swam around them and he was gazing upon her like she’d parted Red Sea, like she was his Rosetta Stone, like she was some Promethean stroke of genius. They kept their bodies close for hours, his proud arm lightly across her shoulders or over her back, switching arms randomly, moving circles around her just to show he could. Her relief was wild.

*

“You say you outran a horse, Mulder?”

“Two horses,” he amended, wickedly.

The Lone Gunmen were sitting around the campfire of Mulder’s coffee table, conspiratorial and over-serious in the chiaroscuro lit terrarium of his somehow tidy abode. Scully was sat tailor-style beside Mulder on floor opposite the techno-musketeers. She’d told him to sit on the couch; his grasshopper legs weren’t built for folding cross-legged on the living room carpet. He’d smiled like she was joking. They could not be apart. His hands were resting on his giant legs, his knuckles brushing her knee.

“You sure you weren’t on some kinda sauce, big guy?” Langly was the sweetheart of the three, shy and excitable, with hair Melissa would have gushed over for weeks. Langly and his nervous blink, happy to be there, his printed tee that said THE UN-GRATEFUL DEAD in monster-mash neon dripping font. She wondered if anyone had called him Gangly Langly in school.

“Maybe my exercise regime just consists of more than daily trips between blue screens and an out-of-warranty refrigerator. You boys should try it some time.” They loved him, their benevolent bully. 

Mulder was larger than usual with joy; in his festive enormity, he swayed warmly against Scully’s side. Just short of convincing her to “go out on the town” with him in celebration of their greatest-yet rebellion, he’d settled for having her and his oracular trio over for a few drinks at his place. She’d agreed reluctantly. Part of her needed the nearby thrum of him. Another part of her, lately, had been tired in a way that sleep could not abate, bone tired. But they could not be apart that day.

“Word on the street is they’re jackin’ water supplies with military-grade methamphetamine in some Russian villages,” Frohike nodded to himself with a knowing scowl. “Amping up a geri nation of speed-fuelled babushkas for Cold War 2.0.”

Here, Byers picked up the thread, dressed like a very serious fourteen year-old with a beard disguise and a loose brown suit and a tie; even Mulder had changed into jeans and a white tee after quickly showering. Byers spoke with his usual air of tempered humility and professorial introspect: “Back in the Second World War, actually, a Finnish soldier named Aimo Koivunen downed thirty capsules of an army-issue combat stimulant named Pervitin – essentially military meth – and managed to escape being surrounded by Soviet forces by skiing 400km straight through the snowy wilderness. Landed himself outside a hospital, having survived on only a pine buds and single, raw Siberian jay for a week.”

“You drink any Russian meth water, Mulder?” Frohike batted his way, cracking open a can.

Scully was the youngest of the lot, but she had come to think of them all as her boys. She was aware of being some special guide amongst them, treated them stern and gentle, realising the great absence she was filling as the singular Light of Woman in their gizmo den. Maybe she was on the outside of the outside, warmly aware of her own partitioned role. Only Mulder could float between their world and hers, at once one of the guys, and also aware of their charming, ludicrous earnestness. Scully pictured her own mother sitting at a close but insurmountable distance from the Scully children in their childhood living room, her strange Irish rabble poised eagerly around the beacon monolith of their father upon his every legendary return. Or maybe Scully was just tired and getting tireder by the day and all she knew was Mulder and work and moving like a barge, slow and heavy and unyielding through the cracking ice. She felt quieter, even with Mulder. Sharpening inwards.

At one point, someone cracked a joke and Mulder’s hand sought the stockinged company of her ankle, sharing his laugh. He left it there, the absent tending of her medial malleolus under the circle of his thumb. He was knocking back another cold one with a half-lidded smile.

“Cheers to sticking it to The Man,” came the gruff salute of Frohike across the table.

“Aren’t we The Man?” Scully piped in drily.

“Yeah, but you guys are like The Man on the Inside,” Langly corrected with a sincere certainty. She offered him a little smile. 

“If you can’t beat ‘em,” said Mulder, the lip of a bottle against his wry mouth. “Inside Man. Langly, we’re so far outside the inside that we’ve left the building. Especially after today. Contempt of Congress. Christ, Scully! I’m green-eyed.” He swayed into her with a glowing sideways look, burning against her, exothermic and soft, thumb still slow over her ankle under the table and it was making her drowsy and warm.

“You’re a bad influence on me,” she admonished half-heartedly, taking a sip of her diet cola.

“Diana always said we needed a man on the inside,” Byers reflected. “You never bring her around anymore.”

“She’s got better things to do than listen to you guys rave on about how ‘satellites burning up as they re-enter the atmosphere’ are actually UFOs.”

“Mulder, that’s your theory,” Scully pinned him.

“Whose side are you on?” he laughed. “You’d go to jail for me, but you won’t let me stick these guys in the ribs?”

“I didn’t do it just for you Mulder,” she said, fighting a creeping edge. It was getting to be too much, especially in front of the easily excited eyes of his three little ducklings. 

“What’s Diana up to these days anyway?” Langly persisted, blinking under his glasses. Scully felt like she was watching a movie with her parents and pretending to look away when the onscreen kiss got heavy.

“Private case consultations with government agencies, globe-trotter stuff. The details are somewhat beyond even my security clearance. Good to know you guys haven’t been keeping tabs.”

“We miss seeing her,” said Byers. “You two had a good thing going back in the day.”

“Show some respect, nimrod,” Frohike cut in, eyes flickering to Scully with all the fury of a mother goose. “If we only get one Lady in Black, my vote’s with this here legend of the law. You lid-lickers don’t know an upgrade when you see one.”

“Hey,” chided Mulder with a disapproving head-tilt. Scully knew he would not say anything more.

She patted the hand he had over her ankle so he would let her up. “Just grabbing a glass of water.”

In the kitchen, she sighed heavy and exhausted at the privacy of the sink. ‘Long day,’ didn’t cover it. Glass in hand, she turned around to find Mulder had followed her in, blinking as if he’d done it without thinking. She searched herself for some reasonable sense of suffocation and found only that his proximity was still somehow not enough. They were savant twins, distressed when apart, and a mono-cognisant pair when together, mumbling numbers to and fro, throwing each other arithmetic patterns incomprehensible to the average mind. They were Siamese introverts at a party, able to function socially so long as they were within seven feet of one another, feet turned subtly towards each other’s radar even while their bodies faced a stranger. She was a lizard on a rock and he was the sun, all over her, charging her up. She couldn’t move some days until she got enough of him. It was too much. She knew it was becoming too much.

“So you didn’t do it just for me, huh?” Mulder asked, voice low, a trickster in his eyes. He was hovering over her. She was backed up against the sink. Distantly, the Lone Gunmen were debating the legitimacy of Y2K.

“I kept my mouth shut because it was the right thing to do, Mulder. Happily, the absurdity of your peripatetic personal quests have so far always aligned with the side of justice and truth. So long as that continues to be the case, I’d do almost anything.”

“Anything?” he lit up, devilish, clearly missing the point. “What about barn-dancing?”

“Yes, Mulder, I’d dance the heel-toe in the name of justice,” she said, giving him The Look and ushering them both back to the Gunmen. But Mulder had gleaned onto a new game, like a puppy on the other end of a tug-o-war rope, and he would not let up. All night, as she listened to the men discuss the intricacies of CCTV facial-recognition programs, Mulder periodically leaned in and threw another furtive hypothetical into the ever-patient receptacle of her ear. _Would you jump onto a moving train? Would you dye your hair blonde? Would you put down a puppy? An innocent little Schnoodle, Scully!_ She elbowed him under the table and he quietly caught hold of her arm. It had started off as a joke, but as the game went on and she realised they both knew what her answer to every question would be, it started to morph into an embarrassing and vaguely depressing parade of her senseless loyalty. She was waiting for him to ask, _Would you go fetch, Scully? Go fetch!_

At some ungodly hour and a few packets of dusty saltines later, the Gunmen were shuffling out the door. Byers led the way with, “Stay out of trouble, agents,” and Langly gave them his best grocery-aisle-run-in smile, and Frohike gave Scully a tip of his figurative hat. Mulder saw them out with his towering warmth and then, with the door closed, returned to the living room to crash next to Scully, who was now slouched in the depths of his couch. 

“You wanna extend this party into a movie night?” he asked, bumping her leg with his. “I’m too wired to sleep.”

“Mulder, from the Siberian tales you’ve been spinning, you should be out cold in a hospital bed, not pulling all-nighters in front of the TV.”

“It’ll hit me when it hits me.”

Scully appraised him with the slow blink of creeping drowsiness, alone with him for the first time in weeks. His hair was flopping in new and interesting ways these days, and in the meagre light of his bat-cave apartment, his eyes were a luminous jade. They were against each other, and the pillow of his shoulder was beckoning her bowling-ball of a head.

“You’re not expecting Diana?” she felt herself ask in a daze. Mulder blinked, impassive.

“She’s out of town,” he said. “Won’t be back for weeks. I called her already, a couple hours ago.” He bumped her leg again, speaking low and conspiratorial. “Come on, Scully, I’ve got a director’s cut of The Thing and a packet of Red Vines that refuse to expire.” She gave him a sceptical grimace. “Don’t tell me you’re just gonna go home and sleep. _Contempt of Congress._ I mean, fuck, Scully!”

“Mulder, I can barely keep my eyes open.”

“Would you feed my fish?” he persisted, then added soberly, “For justice’s sake.”

“I feed your fish all the time.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You’re the one keeping those greedy little bastards alive?”

“I generally assume Diana is out of town,” Scully shrugged, letting her head drop back against the couch. Mulder’s head tilted sideways, keeping her parallel. Scully couldn’t stop herself: “Does Diana know I have a key?” He frowned ever so slightly. “I’d hate to be mistaken for an intruder by a woman with a gun license.”

“She’s not jumpy like that. She’s calmer than the both of us combined.”

“So, she doesn’t know.”

He cleared his throat and turned his attention to the TV. “It didn’t strike me as an announcement that needed to be made. So is that a yes or no to The Thing?”

She huffed a sigh. “Mulder, the idea of watching a horror movie set in Antarctica right now has all the appeal of pulling out my front tooth. We’ve had a week like hell.”

“Would you go to Antarctica for me?” Mulder asked.

“For justice, Mulder. And I wasn’t aware they have crop circles in the South Pole.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Crop circles,” he shook his head, regaining a whispered playfulness. He smelled like the shower he’d managed to take when they first arrived at his place. There was a cheap adhesive bandage over his brow and a five o’clock shadow on the Promised Land of his jaw. “No, but they’ve got abominable snowmen aplenty.” 

“Well, I followed you to the Arctic on a wild goose chase before. Picked you up out of the snow, half dead. What difference is the other end of the world?”

“You make me sound like a pain in the ass.” He tilted his head again, alighting on her with a glow. “Contempt o’ fuckin’ Congress, Scully.”

“For the right thing, Mulder.”

“And if it had been the wrong thing?”

She swallowed, momentarily alert in the searching pool of his sudden and intimate sobriety. Her voice was smaller than she expected. “Would you want me to do something that was wrong?”

Mulder forfeited her gaze then, looking down at his punch-bruised, shiv-wielding, life-saving, back-brushing hands. 

“No, I guess not,” he laughed, humourlessly. “I wouldn’t ask it of you, anyway.” Which wasn’t the same thing. She knew that was her cue.

“If I don’t head back now, I’ll be too tired to drive,” she said, dragging herself up from the quicksand of the easy space beside him. She patted her skirt-pocket absentmindedly, considering the awaiting bliss of dismantling her bra and tossing it into a bonfire, when she felt a small weight at her hip. “Oh, Mulder. You left this with me.” 

Like that, she dropped his scuffed wedding band back into the palm of his hand. 

-

Mulder dunked on a child-killer. Scully helped him dig through a shallow grave with her hands. There was the fresh paint of a frontal lobe Pollocked on the pane of a bus. Mulder pressed his face into her stomach, laughing at his terminal, unending grief. She held him. He was a good man. She left him while she still could. 

-

Leonard Betts needed something from her. 

Mulder drove her home, nervous and disquieted by her silence. She was heavy and black like a glass bullet. Idling his car in the street outside, he reached for her shoulder. _Earth to Scully._

“Where’s Diana?” she asked him, quiet, ungiving under his touch.

He prickled, retracting his hand. “She’s…I told you, she’s out of town, she’s overseas, I-,” he huffed. “I don’t know why you keep asking about her.”

She turned to him, point blank. “You don’t know why?”

Mulder’s mouth opened but he said nothing, blinked, emptyhanded.

She left him alone, entered her building alone, went through her front door alone, and bled alone on the sheets of her pillow.

-

All her life she had been drawn to people whose approval she desired, who liked only her, and yet would never allow her to know or hear the certainty of their affections, who would never confirm it, and would only hint at it through exclusivity and demand, meagre in their rewards. All her life, she had craved so much and reached for so little. All her life, she had not been sure she could even possess what she had wanted if it at last arrived, or to let the sum of her wants have possession over her. 

In the Medieval map of her world, Ed Jerse was the sea under a ‘Here Be Monsters’ sign. But he was no monster. He was a man in a furnace, more human than human, the simmering concentrate of all men. She shook herself loose of her life. They licked each other’s wounds. She stopped playing a part. He understood and desired. He flared up at the needle of her pleasure. She watched him watching her, dizzy with the sting of ink and being wanted so severely. She pushed him, desperate for rebuke. She dared him and needed a fight. And Jerse, thank god, out of the thrashing goodness of his heart, helped throw her life on the fire.


	5. That Was the Future Once

She was holding him at gunpoint. She was the cool gallows-man. She was asking for it. She did it to fuck with him. She did it because she had her own life. She only had her own life to fuck with him. She was in her sexual prime. She was stunning and wasted on him. She was a set-up. She was tricking him into mistakes. She was daring him to be cruel. She was cornering his dirty side. She was fed up. She was being taken for granted. She was threatening him with her calm. She was calm to make him insane. She could do whatever she wanted. She wanted what he couldn’t give. She wanted him to be petty. She refused to engage. She knew he was married. She was icing him out. She was putting this all on him. She was making him impotent. She taunted him with desire. She had a dirty side too. She had the bruise of another man’s hands. She had used her mouth on his skin. She had made sharp sounds in his ear. She had moved and flushed over him. She was watching the image sink in. She had always had it in her. She was breaking a Biblical rule. She was unrecognisable. She was a siren. She was her father’s daughter. She was the realm of extremes. She was delivering ultimatums. She made a Hail Mary choice. She wanted a reason to hate him. He was filthy in love. _Is that what you want? You want to be proven right? I can be like all men. I can throw you up against a wall._ But he was sick and married and just as guilty as charged.

-

A man’s life can get to being an embodiment of Newton’s First Law, and Mulder was an object in motion. He’d been set off two decades earlier by a bright light, a child screaming, and bereavement so steep he’d remained more or less hurtling through space at a constant speed ever since. He hurtled right through years of silence and parents who alternated between acting as mute cell-mates and vessels of random hatred. His father spent so much time avoiding the walking dead of his own family that Mulder didn’t realise his parents had divorced until their annual retreat to Quonochontaug was abruptly cancelled and replaced by his mother making silent vows over the dinner table, alone with Mulder, forgetting he was there to hear her. Once his mother had hit him across the face for breaking his arm at the park. Later, she came into his room weeping and he’d held her and swum in absolution, learning what love looked like.

That night, he dreamt of the time he had stacked it spectacularly while riding with Samantha around the neighbourhood on a late fall afternoon. She’d wobbled to a halt, letting her bike clang to the ground without a care for the paint job or the silver and pink tassels being ruined by the pavement. She’d run to him with a busy frown, using her water bottle and a broad, flimsy maple leaf to fashion a makeshift bandage over the gravelly wound on his knee, proud at her witchy, inventive calm in emergency, and rolling her eyes at Mulder’s groaning assertion that he didn’t need her to baby him. Sometimes he remembered.

He hurtled through high school and girls making passes at him as a joke. He hurtled through the sweet muscle-aches of the basketball team, and sneaking into late night meetings of a local Armageddon cult to take notes. He hurtled through every exam and assignment and found himself suddenly in a matriculation robe and a British mahogany hall. At Oxford, he hurtled through Phoebe Green, whom he found himself in bed with after being dragged along to drinks one night with a group of her friends he didn’t know or understand. He opened car doors and bedroom doors and cubicle doors to find two bodies instead of one, and Phoebe cried or laughed outside his dorm room, depending on whether guilt or pity would work best. He was a sorry man, and he let her use him for self-justification or the butt of a good joke, and he learned again what love looked like. 

One night, after graduation, he dreamt of the time Samantha had made him a macaroni collage on the day he’d graduated elementary school. It read, ‘Dear Fox, You are a genius now! Love Samantha.’ She had asked him how to spell ‘genius’; he had pretended to be surprised when she showed him the gift ten minutes later. Mulder awoke in a sweat, booked a flight to D.C., and hurtled himself back to the land of freedom and the supersized.

Diana, mercifully, slowed his trajectory through the never-ending night of space, though she could not bring him to a halt. She appeared more or less out of nowhere, just as he’d begun his spiraling descent into the world of conspiracy fringe. Somehow, she surprised him by outsmarting him, by not flinching or cracking a smile when he brandished the insanity of his simmering beliefs at her as a sort of people-filter he’d devised. In fact, Diana met him point for point, until suddenly, they were working together, and living together, and married. She had been good to him, better than any other man or woman had been in years. She wasn’t out to take credit for his work, she didn’t consider him unorthodox, she didn’t need his attention or expect much at all from him as a man, so long as he impressed her and got the work done. They were a “dynamic duo,” as the Gunmen coined them, shaking in their scuffed-up boots at the sight of her in all her marble stability.

Mulder relearned love for what felt like the final time. It looked like being held to a standard and being soothed and encouraged and put in his place every once in a while when his hurtling got out of hand. It was good, and he got too used to it. Needed it too much, needed more. So, to save them both from distracted dependency, Diana took up a clandestine position overseas serving government investigations and diplomacy, keeping herself out of his way so he could do the work that needed to be done, above all. As always, she had done better for him than himself, and alone he worked like Mozart on his death bed, like a jazz drummer, limbs jutting out in riffs of divine inspiration and melodious clang, hurtling to the end-time with a buzzer in his heart and a stone.

Dana Scully, unbalanced force of the world, was proud and watchful, curious and frustratingly tolerant, and she liked him, raving canon-ball of a man, uprooted his life entirely. 

Sometimes Mulder felt all men he feared were his father and all women he loved were his mother. Scully was a match being struck in a cave. Sometimes Mulder was a hungry American man, buck-wild; Scully was a slow-rider, pulling on his mane and running a cool hand over the length of his glistening side. Sometimes he suspected there was a woman in him; Scully loved her protectively. Scully was the millisecond of blackness he saw in the back of his eyelids every time he blinked. She was beautiful in a way that was beginning to feel cruel. She was his left lung.

They lost sisters and fathers together. They walked into a barn littered with fifty warm bodies, dead and slumped over drained party cups. She didn’t believe him, but he had stood in a field stained with the chrome of his century-old blood, and knew he’d met her before. In all his past lives, love was taken away. In all his past lives, Scully died. And she was his father and his mother, his sister and blood-brother, his Jiminy Cricket and his only friend. They needed each other in infinite ways, always learning. In this life, some tremulous, synaptic new need was hovering in the widening gap between them. Every action they took towards it summoned a reaction, equal and opposite and invariably punishing.

Mulder was a superstitious man. It seemed fitting that the white-robed embrace of Scully’s superhuman forgiveness should come hand in hand with black-robed coronation of death. He held her up in a sterile hallway and kissed the skin over what was taking her from him, bargaining fruitlessly. Scully stood at the abyss of death like someone returning to the home of an estranged friend, proud and at peace with every choice she had ridden down over to the precipice. Choice – in a moment of lucidity, Mulder knew. And he loved her and would never survive her.

-

“Where were you all month?”

Diana's silhouette against the threshold was a familiar portrait. Mulder felt a pre-emptive pang, and hardened reflexively under it to steel himself for what had to be done. 

“You know I can’t discuss the details of my whereabouts,” she replied, and moved through the nocturnal waters of their apartment to be standing between his legs where he sat on the couch. 

“Why the hell not, actually?” he pushed on. “Because I still send you every single one of my case reports for The X-Files but I don’t even know what city you’re in when you’re away.”

Diana took a step back from him then. Her face remained in shadow, but he sensed the ever-steady whir of thought and assessment in her eyes.

“The nature of my work is different,” she supplied, coolly. “The X-Files is yours; it was once ours. But the work I’m doing now is far outside your jurisdiction.”

“Everybody has some higher power to report to, even me.”

“I’m reporting to powers much higher than you can imagine.”

“Scully has cancer,” he said, belligerently. “It was given to her by the higher powers you so reverently describe. She’s dying.”

Diana took a beat, then moved to sit before him on the coffee table. She lowered herself with the caution of a man around a black bear, and at her new height, the light of the aquarium lit her face in a marbling blue. 

“I’m sorry to hear it,” she said. “Truly.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

Diana searched him for a moment. “You told me about a year ago that you’d found a group of women with abductee experiences and neck implants identical to Agent Scully’s, and that they were all developing terminal cancers at a rate which seemed, to me, to preclude coincidence. I did the math.”

Once, Mulder had taken a baseball bat to the head standing too close to the home base as catcher, and it had taken a few moments for the pain to set in, but his body had swooned in anticipation of it all.

“You knew this would happen?” he asked. He was standing all of a sudden, shouting, jittery. Diana remained where she sat, looking up at him evenly.

“I thought it was obvious.”

“We...we never stopped to think-” He was grasping for a foothold. “You should have said something.”

“I assumed you had both considered the possibility. In any case, would it have helped?” she asked. “You’d have spent another year grieving over the inescapable. Perhaps if you’d…” She trailed off and dropped her gaze.

“What?”

She squared him, seeming to sense the end of a road.

“Perhaps if you’d taken an interest in this one year ago, instead of sidelining it until it became of personal importance to you, you might have had more time to investigate and uncover the powers behind this together. You’ve always dismissed my belief that Agent Scully has been a hindrance to your work; I think you misunderstand what I mean by hindrance. The two of you make each other selfish. How much time have you spent chasing each other around, out of your minds with concern? How often did you and I find ourselves caught up in romantics such as that?”

A new glisten found its way into the coating of her eyes, and Mulder was surprised to realise Diana was on the verge of tears, stolid as she remained on the skin. In a rush of guilt and useless apology, he kneeled before her, took up her hands.

“Diana…” he began. She met his eyes, and there was no doubt that she knew. “Even after my parents were divorced, they shared more of their lives than this.”

“I don’t know what you think a marriage looks like, Fox. You and I are the same. We come from the same places. You’re not built for what you might think you desire.”

“Maybe we’re not the same,” he said, sorry and unsure. “Maybe I need more.”

Diana lightly squeezed his hand. Long ago, they had done each other some good.

“I have always said,” she told him, more earnest than ever, a sad resignation etched into the eons of time in her face, “whatever I do, distant and incomprehensible to you as it may seem, I only ever have your best interests at heart. That’s all I can offer. Truth is, you’re a lot of work, Fox. And - I don’t think you love me as much as I’ve loved you.”

“No,” Mulder said. “But I tried harder.”

Diana nodded as though she had known this for centuries, as though she had seen her whole life laid out before her and now marched serenely to the end, believing only the inevitable. Mulder wondered if he and Scully were fools for kicking and screaming. Diana withdrew her hands.

“Are the two of you together?” she asked him with all the passion of asking for a napkin.

Mulder shook his head, relieved to be telling the truth. 

“Scully isn’t the reason,” he said, riding a train of realisations he wished he could disembark. One man wasn’t built for so much thinking. His brain throbbed. Was this how women felt all the time? “Tell me you’re not miserable too.”

There was only the low hum of the fish tank and the sound of a distant ambulance. Diana stood like a glacier and went to the door where her suitcase still stood as though it had prophesized the upheaval of the night. She sighed an age and opened the door, stopping only to say, “Sometimes I think you’re cruel because you think it takes a lot to hurt me, and you want me to know how it feels. You don’t give me enough credit, you know.”

“I _am_ sorry,” he offered, lamely.

“Who the hell isn’t?” she said, and was gone. Was there a Newton’s Law which stated all great happiness relied on another’s great pain?


	6. One or Another in the Brief Sequence

A man can only keep so many secrets from the Scully voice in his head. The house of Mulder had three hidden compartments. If one wandered too far down the hallways of his guilt, they might chance upon a fridge containing a vial of ova and more bad news than any one woman should ever have to bear. Take a left at the top of the stairs, and down the ring-finger corridor of his broken promises, one might find that by removing the false pretence of his prop wedding band, Mulder was one imminent signature away from being an unmarried man. A hop and a skip further, two doors down from the rooms of his shame, lay a wardrobe, heavy and dark; manage to heave open its two brass-knobbed doors, and you would find it empty – but for a miniature music box. The box did not belong to him; he had stolen it from Scully. And hers was the only hand that could wind it, the only key that could unlock it, and the only ear that would recognise the sad little song it played. She hummed it for him in his head.

Feeling somewhat adventurous, or possibly unbearably depressed, Mulder decided to take himself and his secrets for a walk around the neighbourhood one morning. It was a few days after Scully’s birthday, and Spring was knocking on the bare-branched streets of Washington. Mulder found himself at the local outdoor basketball courts, drawn there by a honing signal etched somewhere deep in the varsity marrow of his bones. The air smelled like kids smoking behind trees and a churro truck on the kerb, and Mulder let the snap-freeze of morning ice jolt awake his alveoli. At first, he stood absentmindedly beyond the chain fence, lost in the comfort of seeing kids ankle-bite and skid across the asphalt with all the joint-laxity of his yesteryears. Then his Scully voice said, _Mulder, you’re staring_ , so he relocated to a nearby bench under a maple skeleton to avoid descending prematurely into his destiny as ‘lonely old man in an oversized leather jacket watching kids play in the park with a distant look in his eyes.’ 

Agent Pendrell was dead, Scully was dying, Mulder had flushed his marriage down the toilet and was hiding it from Scully for reasons both obvious and absurd - and he had her ova. As he considered the otherworldly insanity of that last point, a Walkman-equipped preteen, who apparently took all his sartorial cues from Will Smith in _Fresh Prince_ , came to a head-bopping stop at the churro truck before him. Mulder jumped to his feet with a cousin of the same impulsivity that often inspired him to punch deserving suspects or ex-Soviet rat-boys out of the blue, and tapped Fresh Prince Jr on the shoulder.

“Hey, kid, lemme spring you a churro,” Mulder offered breezily. The kid frowned at him for a moment before giving a Gallic shrug and a happy, “A’ight,” and redonning his headphones. 

Mulder’s pockets were infinite in number and depth and the soon-to-be luckiest kid on the planet was watching him scour the recesses of his personage for his wallet. It materialised eventually and Mulder pulled it out as though performing a magic trick for an unimpressed audience of one. Mulder turned to the moustachioed churro vendor in search of admiration for his deed; no cigar. He cleared his throat and paid for the churro. 

A few short moments later, handing his sugar-dusted gift to the kid, he said, out of nowhere, “I’d be a pretty neat dad, huh?”

The kid shrugged. Mulder retracted the churro. “What does that mean?”

The kid’s hand was still outstretched and his expression grew in judgement and perplex.

“Churros cost fifty cents, what do you want me to say? Man, I don’t know you. But, you know,” he added, sensing the mental instability of the man holding his deep-fried prize, “thanks for the churro and everything.”

“Alright, you know what, no churro for you,” Mulder said. His Scully voice said, _Mulder, just give him the goddamn churro_. But before he could listen, Little Prince made a face and said, “Whatever, tight-ass,” before flipping him off and bopping away.

“Kids shouldn’t say ass!” Mulder yelled after him, pointlessly. He pressed his eyes shut for a moment then looked up at the stone-faced churro vendor. “You got chocolate sauce?”

Once re-rooted on his old-man bench, Mulder realised suddenly that he was calling Scully’s cell and had his mobile wedged between his shoulder and his ear. The click of her picking up felt like opening the front door to her home.

“Mulder, what time is it?” He heard bedsheets and a stifled yawn. Distantly – very distantly – he considered feeling guilty for waking her up.

“Scully, in your professional opinion, would you consider me to be a tight-ass?”

“You once nearly passed out in an airplane bathroom on a sixteen hour trip because you refused to pay for an in-flight meal.”

He paused to swallow a bite of his churro. “Is that a yes?”

“You know, Mulder, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again until you stop calling me at… _six-forty-five_ in the morning on a Sunday over an accurate self-diagnosis of pathological stinginess: therapy.”

“I can’t go to a therapist. I have trust issues.”

There was a silence that sounded either like a smile or a temple rub. “Goodbye, Mulder,” she said warmly, and hung up on him all the same.

The question at hand: by calling her, was he wasting precious minutes of what little life she had left? Or was he seizing precious minutes of what little life she had left to spend with him? She had sighed before hanging up but it wasn’t her, _“Please, God, let me have one minuscule moment of rest on this godforsaken Earth,”_ sigh. It was her, _“Oh, brother,”_ sigh. She had a catalogue of sighs, and that one was by far her most charmed - albeit self-loathingly. By all standards, that phone call had gone considerably well.

She had been warm with him ever since their conversation about the Apollo 11 badge gift. Mulder had seen it hanging in the impulse-buy rack by the front desk of his local bodega. It reminded him of Scully in ways he didn’t consciously understand and his Scully voice had said, _I understand. Bring it to me and I’ll tell you_ , so he had. She looked up at the sky in all her grave, inward-turned beauty and the open crane of her neck had been a canvas for moonlight sublime. Lately, it had required military restraint not to kiss her and throw her down in the hay. Lately, she seemed as though she might not mind if he tried. _All this from a star_ , she told him, and appeared unopposed to being returned to one soon. Looking upwards and outwards with wisdom both Athenian and centuries-tamed, she made him listen to his place in the brief sequence of good-hearted people, and she was saying, _I’m not abandoning you, Mulder. I’m leaving you in good hands_. She spoke like a woman on death row. She reminded him with quiet urgency of the outstretching arms of the world. 

Mulder took another sorry bite of his churro and wondered at the life-expectancy of his Scully voice. In the event that it only existed so long as she did, he would be marooned interminably. He considered the logistics of driving out each day to press his ear to her grave.

-

As the black comedy of her life would have it, she and Mulder were doing very well since she learned she was going to die. For a while, they’d been locked in the perilous circling of a coin in a funnel, and she had the Kafka- and spite-inspired ink-stain to prove it. But the prospect of irretrievable absence made the heart grow fonder, so it seemed. Standing over the fresh soil of Agent Pendrell’s grave, it had occurred to Scully anew that friends died – they died suddenly and without warning and for the most arbitrary causes – and once they were dead, one could not talk to them anymore. It seemed obvious, but the plain heartbreak of it stung in sharp and original ways.

So when, in recent weeks, Mulder established the unofficial ritual of thrice weekly phone calls a few hours after they got home from work, she did not complain or feel stifled as she might have a few months prior. She would set herself up on the couch with a tea and a blanket and listen to him sound-off like a radio show host off the leash, occasionally indulging him a dignified rebuttal or otherwise yawning to reassure him she was still breathing. Often she fell asleep with him rambling softly and incoherently in her ear, tucked into the crook of her neck, more often as the weeks went on and her body crunched slow to a halt under the weight of a black malady. Sometimes, they would both become distracted with reading or research or old horror reruns and stay on the phone for hours without thinking, wordlessly working up a phone-bill to rival that of a Wall Street broker.

Then Mulder Indiana Jonesed his way into her apartment to find her two hairs from doing the wild thing with a pale imitation of himself, and the phone calls had taken hiatus. She almost wished she could blame it on Diana, but Mulder had been arriving to work early for the past few months, and when Diana was home he always arrived on time or marginally late for reasons uninspiringly clear. Scully had refrained from questioning Diana’s absence, and Mulder had more or less refrained from putting her in a position that necessitated its mention. He had also refrained from mentioning the event with van Blundht. In the office he was pleasant and helped her every day at five with her coat. But there was no question as to why his calls had dropped off. Scully had been hanging around the phone like a teenager the week before prom. The situation was getting dire and ludicrous.

A full ten days of off-hours radio-silence later, the receiver turned Lazarus on her with a shrill cry and she choked on her microwaveable tikka-masala-for-one as she jumped to answer the phone.

“Mulder,” she said through a mouthful and a pitiful but mercifully inaudible smile.

“Wait, is this not Pizza Hut?”

She rewarded him with the light huff of a laugh. Why not? She was going to die.

“Damnedest thing, Scully,” he began, “you were just at my apartment. The spitting image of you. Only, this Scully didn’t seem to appreciate that I am a lawfully married man, so I sent her packing quick smart, after a drink or two.” 

“Mulder.”

“You’d think I might have caught on right away, but it’s surprisingly difficult to tell when someone you’ve spent most days of the past four years with is acting out of character. ”

_“Mulder-”_

“The Venn diagram of shapeshifters – or as you like to call them: genetically gifted individuals – and people intent on employing cheap tricks of seduction in the global campaign to separate us is beginning to look an awful lot like a circle. Just another mystery for science, I guess. What’s for dinner?”

“Look, Mulder, I’m not about to apologise for nearly being assaulted. I froze, I was confused. Maybe a part of me knew I was in danger.”

There was a beat, and when he spoke again, his tone was earnest and light-hearted but ashamed. 

“Sorry, I was just, uh – I was trying to clear the air.”

“I know,” Scully sighed, relenting easily. She deserted her half-finished tray of food, less hungry these days, and lugged her body to the unlit quiet of her bedroom. She threw herself down with a huff, settling in. Over the phone, they were old friends. “I was confused. It didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. I wasn’t sure.”

“Out of nowhere,” he echoed carefully.

“I’m not a block of wood, Mulder,” she said, somewhat recklessly. Mulder maintained his silence. “But if he’d- If it had… _progressed_ , I would have known it wasn’t you.”

“You’ve never seen me lay the moves, Scully.”

“You spend enough time with someone, you can infer reliably,” she replied, omitting the particulars of the dopamine-riddled sequelae her powers of inference had incurred many a hasty, humid night. “And the ways people recognise each other far exceed mere sight. Our bodies are attuned to the subtle intonation and modulation of a voice, unique patterns of speech, the temperature of a person’s body and their habitual micro-expressions, their scents, both obvious and imperceptible. You forget I once drove you across the country and fed and kept you clean for a week while you were febrile and unconscious. I would have known.”

“You been familiarising yourself with my pheromonal bouquet, Dr Scully?”

“Mulder,” she warned. She paused, then started to say, “It’s only natural that-” but aborted that sentence swiftly. Instead, she tried, “You know, we talk on the phone enough that you might as well be here.”

“I’m trying to respect your work-life boundaries.”

“‘Trying’ being the operative word.” The room was quiet and empty as a sepulchre, and a light wind was making a Gatsby-esque picture of her curtains in the moonlight. Mulder’s breaths came quietly over the phone. “Mulder, when was the last time you ate dinner with another human being?”

“When’s the last time you had a fortnight of dinners without me calling to interrupt you?”

“If you did come by, I wouldn’t bite.” She touched the cross on her neck. “Neither would you, as we know.”

“But maybe you’d let me,” he replied, and she could hear a dangerous dance in his eyes. There was a plumb-bob hanging from the base of her throat to her chest.

“Unfortunately for you, Mulder,” she said softly, “I don’t make the same mistake twice,” and it was unclear to both of them which in the lifelong career of her mistakes she was referring to. “Okay. Goodnight, Mulder,” she said at last, and she heard him swallow before making a hushed reply.

Of course, she had been waiting and wishing for him to tug at a thread she knew well to be loose. The shape of him, scentless and heatless as van Blundht’s Mulder was, had been enough to muddy the long neglected and want-addled regions of her brain. The shape of Mulder’s hand lost in the well of her lap, the looming heaviness and the sighing sink of the couch beneath her. The promise of being trapped under the weight of him, pressed into the upholstery, wound up and released like a diver’s first re-emerging breath. Perhaps a part of her had noticed the absence of his wedding ring and known something was amiss. Perhaps a part of her was dying, and bored of her own hands, and tired enough of waiting that she had not questioned it. Perhaps on the days when when the cellular sap of neoplastic exertion did not rob her of all hot-blooded longings – perhaps on those days her body pleaded and screamed to be touched.

She was always at once saturated by and starved of Mulder. Facing the abyss, she’d found it impossible not to admit. He had held and kissed her face chastely once under the weak fluorescence of hospital corridor lights, and looking up at him then, the mass killing her and the mass keeping her alive all between his two hands, she had known it was over for her. The fumes it took to survive. He was married, but death made her hungry and tempted in love, as the blunder with van Blundht had made clear. 

Scully made a sound adjacent to a groan and slumped into her mattress, languishing and restless and always mysteriously bruised. She huffed and felt the stretch of skin over her ribs, trailed her fingers idly down the midline of her abdomen, rested them over the jut of her anterior superior iliac spine. She touched her body like a warm cadaver, knew herself like an anatomical man. Mulder touched her the way people sunk their hands into pockets; without thinking, like she was built for containing him. Mulder touched her the way some people chewed away at their nails; a quiet habit, like he needed it, like he couldn’t stop himself if he tried.

She thought of him. She hardly had to think of him at all when the surge of it resided so readily below the surface, a circuitous exposed wire. Half in despair, she tended to herself, working towards it like rain. It sat in her throat like a sob. A soft pressure grew in the room. There was an encompassing sound in her ear. There was a burrowing gyre in her chest. There was a prickling rise and a struggling, wrenched-out cry - then she was heavy and soothed, and drifting alone in the windless sea of her bed.


	7. Will You Fight to Stay Alive Here, Riding the Earth Toward God-knows Where?

For some, the veils were lifted. Where others groped blindly, seeking illumination, some only did what they could to dim the lights a little while. Some needed not gaze so long into the abyss to meet a second pair of eyes.

The first time Scully knew death, she was young enough to accept magic as truth, to be incapable of distinguishing the imaginable from the possible. When Scully was nine years old, her piano teacher was killed driving home from a baseball game. The night before the accident, Scully dreamt she saw her teacher lying dead and serene on a marble floor in the foyer of a grand hotel. There was a concert piano in the corner, and her teacher was there too, playing Clair de Lune. Her teacher was behind the front desk also, in a ruby and gold concierge uniform, holding a large key with a tasseled adornment. She held out the key to Scully, and there was a weeping gash on her right temple.

“Are you okay?” Scully asked her. The piano teacher’s face was indistinguishable beyond a general blur and her name escaped memory, but Scully knew all things and recognised her beyond a doubt. The piano teacher placed the brass key in Scully’s hand and her little arm sunk under the weight of it. “Is this the key to my room?” The piano teacher seemed to nod warmly. “Where are you going to sleep?” The piano teacher closed Scully’s fingers gently around the key and held her hand for a moment before entering the back room and disappearing silently.

The next day, Maggie sat her girls down at the dining table and delivered the news with cautious gravity. Melissa wept. “I can sense her spirit around us,” she said, teary and so sure. Of course she could; Scully saw her piano teacher standing right there in the corner of the room, clear as day. She was a hologram of dust motes, suspended in the shafts of light filtering through the kitchen window. Scully watched her through red and watery eyes, went to her mother, afraid. When she looked up from the refuge of her mother’s arms, the piano teacher was gone. Scully had loved that woman. She used to give the children dried flowers, and old photographs from flea markets with notes in cursive on the back, and say, “Some things endure so that they might tell us something that they have not told another soul, something only we can hear. Music is like that.” Death began as an old friend, come to say goodbye. Death began as a parting wave.

Scully saw it everywhere, and was underwhelmed by claims of auras or chakras or omens, even confused, actually, by why people would go to such lengths to visualise a world she took as evident. A ghost waved to her on every corner. When she was fifteen, on their walk home from school, Melissa said grimly, “That house gives me the chills. There is a presence there, Dana,” and Scully looked to the grey house in question and knew there was a dead body inside. She rolled her eyes at Melissa’s theatrics and hid a shudder. A week later, a retired, widower veteran was found dead on the second floor, having had a stroke in the bathroom. Death was a lonely room. Death was an empty house.

In medical school, Scully supposed she might find some reprieve from the reaper, beginning to suspect the terror lived within her rather than without, and that there was something morbid behind her eyes that others found alien and obscure. Saving lives was as far from being haunted as one could get. Still, on the wards, death hung over some rooms like doors marked by a blood-cross. She averted her gaze. She learned to interpret heart murmurs, and the various symphonies of gushing, rhythmic life, a cacophony most repellent to the silence of a parting soul. But, her first viewing of autopsy, she was transfixed. She suffered a relapse most divine. Death was a murder mystery. Death was the story of life preserved.

Then, of course, she was drawn to it in men. Daniel Waterson, who believed he would never die, and who believed that acting young and flouting consequence did anything to slow the immutable march of time, to deflect the Reckoning. Jack Willis, who distracted himself from death with bouts of rage and mercurial passions and ever-forward moving obsessions. Luther Lee Boggs, who was already dead, who had been given Sight, and was the first to recognise it in her. Ed Jerse, whom death held in a chokehold. Jerse, who reached desperately out from the abyss towards Scully, terrified and grappling to take her down with him. She bit him for the second time in one day and felt the chrome of him wet her tongue. She thought maybe the first and last thing she would ever taste in life would be someone else’s blood. The blood that giveth and the blood that taketh away. She spat death on the floor. Death was a seductress. Death was an aphrodisiac for life. 

Women evolved at some point in history to create life as a way to dispel death, but it only made them more susceptible. Women carried death within them, gestated it, ran their hands over it and bore it forth in a bloody cry. Women hated death, and made love to it, and understood it awaited them around every corner no matter how hard they worked or what kind of legacy they left behind. Even Diana had worn it in the weary set of her brow the few times they had met. Death was intimate. Death was a secret that their mothers had told them to keep. 

Mulder contained all men and all women. He contained all children and all the childless, old and alone. He came to her in dreams. Half-dead, he had come to her from a Navajo desert, knowing she was there, seeing between realms. Mulder who would kill only to save. He was a sanctum of life forced into divine executioner, and it caused him great pain. Mulder who still grimaced at cadavers and cried over the bodies of dead women where most men she knew couldn’t muster the wherewithal to appear disturbed. He turned his face from the dropping branches of his family tree, fled from death, and in fleeing, ran headlong towards it. 

When it caught up with them both in the form of a metabolic and cellular thief, they engaged in a careful game of taboos. Mulder mistook Scully’s silence for fear. But there merely existed to her a crudeness in discussing death aloud, and she was possessive over its privacy. Just as equally, she was sorry and ashamed to the point of sickness over her failure – failure to prove something, failure to survive for herself, failure to put on a face, failure to protect Mulder. Some days, she caught him watching her with a premonition of grief so sharp and unintentional that she had the urge to pull him in and say, _Look away. Don’t look now, Mulder. I’ll tell you when it’s okay_. Instead, she was seeing Bluebeard ghosts in the bathroom and crying in her car and wishing she had the courage to be selfish.

The week after she learnt her cancer had metastasised, Scully bled death in droplets onto a piece of paper in the basement office. Mulder trailed off mid-spiel on the history of cursed paintings.

“Scully-,” he froze, a hand on her back.

“It’s okay, keep going. I’m fine. We don’t need to talk about it,” she said, fumbling for a tissue. Then, warmer, pitiful, seeing his expression, she added, “Call me superstitious.”

“That’s my name,” he joked, weakly.

She whispered, mostly to herself, “Maybe we have the same names.”

Death was a countdown timer. Death was cruel to the love that survived.

-

The battlefield is silent at the apex of war. Bodies drag slowly against the mud, arching and leaping through decelerated time. Mouths gape in Edvard Munch-ian horror, a voiceless scream, a battle cry turned on mute by a TV remote. There were other no man’s lands. There was the silence in the stretch of mattress between two lovers on the ledge. There was the soundlessness of aircraft burning through the atmosphere. And there was the intensive care unit in the Bethesda Hospital, Washington. 

Scully took up post at the nurses bay, floated her way down the halls, looked into the rooms, soaked in the mum of the final frontier. Palliative treatment was far kinder on her body than the one experience of chemotherapeutic wipeout she had endured. Management was purely symptomatic at this stage - not curative. She understood that with more clarity than most patients. She grasped the aetiology of her descent on a microscopic, histological level. Magicians are never dumbfounded by another man’s act.

The crunch of a choc-chip cookie amplified in her own ears was the only sound on the ward other than the mechanical lung of life support machines. All the blood they’d taken to run routine pathology left her both nauseous and lightheaded. She dry-swallowed another bite and absentmindedly flipped through the patient file lying outside room twenty-three. Male, midnight of his twenty-first birthday, crouched on the roof of his car for a joy-ride stunt, empty parking lot, thrown off by sudden stop, trauma to base of skull, bilateral CSF leakage through ear canals noted upon discovery by paramedics. Scully peered in the open door and saw the anti-umbilical machinations of a ventilator piped down the throat of a slim, pale boy with white-blond hair and swollen eyelids, and she knew he was going to die. She regarded her cookie with guilt; it felt rude to fuel her own vitality. 

“Visiting hours are over.” Scully turned to find a young nurse in white scrubs down the end of the hall. She hid her cookie in her coat pocket, a leftover instinct from nights on the porch with her mother’s lighter and a death wish.

“I’m, uh- I’m not a visitor,” she said, approaching the woman at the nurses bay. She was Scully’s height, younger, golden telluric skin, even under the pale fluorescents. Her badge read, ‘Nurse M. Rosario.’ Her eyes were beautiful, bright and dark, like the sun glinting off black coffee. Scully liked to look at her. There was a scarcity of time, these days, to look at beautiful things. 

Rosario relaxed her frown, eyes dropping to Scully’s lapel in search of a name-tag.

“Patient or doctor?”

“Both actually.”

Rosario sized Scully up with a questioning taciturnity. Perhaps it was the exhausted honesty in her eyes – she shrugged and leaned back against the desk, letting it go.

“You really want to spend your off-hours in a pre-morgue, lady?” she asked, and began chewing on a piece of gum she had apparently stashed in her cheek. Scully remembered how much she would have overlooked for some good company on a graveyard shift like this during clinical placements in her final year of medical school. 

“I spend many of my on-hours in an actual morgue,” she explained, taking a settling breath and moving to lean against the desk as well. “A lot of the doctoring I do is posthumous, which I realise goes against the core tenets of medicine. Maybe it’s perverse, but I thought coming here might remind me of the fight for life that precedes the defeat I’ve become overfamiliar with in my line of work.”

“You know, working this ward,” Rosario said, holding a piece of gum out to Scully which she politely declined, thinking of her cookie, “you get a sense of people close to it.”

“Close to what?”

“You know.”

“People _treading the outer rim of the mortal coil?_ ’ Scully offered drily.

“That’s right. Exactly,” Rosario laughed, giving Scully an bemused frown. It was a Mulder line. Sometimes Scully tried him on for size. Sometimes she missed him in conversation.

“Lately, everyone sees death in me,” she said, a thin-lipped smile at the ground. “I feel like I’ve got a headstone where my face should be. Ironic that I should be the last person to see it so clearly in myself.” She kicked the floor lightly with the toe of her boot. “You’re right, of course.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Rosario nodded, solemnly. The right stranger was as good as family. It struck Scully how easy it could be to love anyone by knowing them. There was a comfort in that. Rosario took in a deep breath and straightened up. The kinship ended as it must. “It’s a quiet night. But it’s always quiet here,” she said, and she was working again. A light flickered in the hall. Scully knew there was a difference between believing and accepting. She heard her own silence. At last, she came to terms.

-

It was easy for Scully to believe. It was easy enough for her to believe that a dying man could psychokinetically compel Mulder to pin her under a barrel, and that a lonely retiree could have premonitions of banana cream pie and Mulder gashed at the neck. She felt these things to be true the way children did. It was precisely the easiness of her belief that rendered her a most rigorous inquisitor. Human and earthly wonder could be explained by human and earthly science. Only God, who by nature transcended human reason and definition, escaped scientific proof - and disproof, for that matter. And only God earned her unquestioning belief.

Beside her, Mulder wrestled uselessly. He was locked out from the world of souls. He believed in all manner of conspiracies without, but could not see the plain-sight ghost within. He bore holes into his skull and went to jail and hollered her name through the bars all night. All the shots in the world, and Scully’s cheek against his back. Doors were being blown in and uniformed boots clomped on hardwood. Scully let her hand run from the valley between Mulder’s shoulder-blades up to his soft neck, under the cue of which he turned and crushed her against him needily. She responded with instinct, one hand moving to run rivers over the gun-powder scent of him, whispering hushing sounds. They were on their knees. They could not get close enough. To be held. The weight of it assailed them both. Had it been so very long? Yes, yes, it had been years. Brow creased under an old ache, she pressed her lips the side of his head, and the shudder this elicited made them clasp each other yet. Something vital was interchanged; both in the act of needing and the act of being needed there was an equal, sharp reward. There was a flaring restraint in the great bulk of him. She knew he could have struck her down with ease, how easily cruel he could have been. She saw then it was a good thing, a very good thing, that he chose to be a gentle man. Someone screamed _Get down!_ and they were being wrenched apart. Badges and too many arms. Mulder went like a guilty man.

A few days under observation – mostly psychological – and he was out of the hospital and back in the rabbit hole of his apartment. Scully drove him home. She watched him walk like a spectre through the front door and find his way in the dark towards his couch. Maybe he was still experiencing photosensitivity. Maybe this was his life, a bat cave.

“How are you feeling?” she asked him, hovering in the living room. He slung himself over the sofa, one leg propped up, the other hanging down, one arm draped over his brow, like an artist’s study of anatomy.

“Still embarrassed, actually,” 

“Don’t be. We’re almost even now.” 

“Yeah, except I keep missing my target,” he said, and with a groan, moved to make room for Scully on one half of the couch. She sat carefully beside him, a pillow between them for safety. He had not been wearing his ring lately, and she was losing sight of her inhibitions as the mortal timer wound down. 

She exhaled and leaned forward to prop her elbows on her knees.

“Mulder, I’m concerned for you.”

“ _You’re_ worried about _me_?” He breathed a glum laugh and threw his head back against the couch. “Pot. Kettle.”

“Listen to me, Mulder.” He turned to her with unguarded eyes. There was a tone she assumed when she needed him to hear. It always took him by surprise, she knew, and used it sparingly, like a distress signal. “I’m not afraid of dying,” she told him. “I know death. I know how to die. I don’t regret any of the choices I’ve made that have led me here. What I’m afraid of is how much I’d be leaving behind - or maybe how little. I’m afraid of the pain I’ll be causing my mother. I’m afraid of leaving you as I found you. Your surprise at having someone on your side. I’m concerned that in my absence, our work will stall or that you’ll be in danger on your own. You said that you know what I am afraid of, that we’re afraid of the same things and I feel that’s true. But this, this worries me, Mulder, the way that you’re handling things. I’m afraid that maybe — maybe we’ll miss each other in a terrible way while we’re apart.”

“I don’t believe in an afterlife, Scully,” he said, sitting up now. He was solemn and calm and so intelligent. There was a philosopher in him, and a ticking bomb. “It’s never troubled me before. Part of me is so sure I’ll see her again in this life that to believe in a hereafter would feel like giving up. But lately…I mean, is this it, Scully? Is this all we get? A few years with the people we love and then oblivion?” 

He was under the fist. She watched him swallow his pain, rock himself to self-soothe, the habit of a child who had suffered alone. His head dropped and at the sight of tears she broke and went to him, closing the space with ease, pulling him in against her chest while it still sounded a sturdy beat.

“You may not believe in life beyond death Mulder, but I do,” she whispered into his hair. His face was hot and warm against her. “I believe the dead are not lost to us because we are not lost in death. Whether you interpret that as theistic creed or spiritual naturalism or something to do with quantum physics and the basic laws of matter, I believe, Mulder – I know – that something in us endures, and that we will be with those we love again after we die.”

He looked up, searching, laughing tragically.

“I can’t wait that long for you.”

This admission caused Scully a not insignificant amount of pain, and to mask it, to escape verbal countenance with something she already knew, with knowledge which had in fact been her rationale in following Mulder into his apartment in the first place, she pulled him closer in and - in a panic - pressed a silencing kiss to his brow. Mulder received it solemnly, like knighthood. When she pulled back, his eyes were still closed and he lowered himself once more. Their bodies ran hot. His hills were her valleys. They lost track of borders. She smoothed her hands over the wired silk of his hair.

“God, Mulder,” she breathed. “Who takes care of you?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his cheek in a slow downward arc against her, nesting.

“It can’t be me,” she said, almost pleading. “It can’t be that I’m the only one.”

“After a while, you forget,” he said, plainly.

Finally, she understood. Her hand stilled. He looked up at her in question, eyes shining nobly like a child’s, understanding like a man’s. And then, at long last, she kissed him to remind him. 

Somewhere a satellite bore witness to the death of a red star, but she was warm and soft on his lips. A politician was accepting bribery to conceal trafficking, but she was sipping at his grief. A tree in the amazon was felled pointlessly, but Scully was persisting in a soft recovery of skin, at first careful and feather-light with fear, then yielding as his hands found anchor in her hair and round her waist. Pets were abandoned on the sides of rain-glassed roads, and Mulder was lost in the stroke of her jugular and the nape of her white neck, making guttural sounds. Fathers were walking out the door for good, and she was lying back, pulling Mulder down over her, afraid and desperate and slowly reckoning with the flood of years restrained. _You deserve only this much. Nothing less._

“Mulder,” came the last word in her vocabulary. She was breathless beneath him, grappling. She leeched away his grief, drinking it from him, distressed by her swimming want of it and the maelstrom of his need. He was all over her. He had the chambers of her heart inside his mouth.

“Scully, don’t let me do this,” he said into her lips. As if to incriminate herself, to cement her complicity, she fumbled wilder against him, seeking a neck and the thread of hair through insufficient fingers and the valley of a back and a hefty torso weighing her down into the length of the couch. Scully was panicking now under the slip of self-control, vanishing in rear-view. Perhaps a mistake was best made more recklessly the second time, and she had made this one before. She was pulling at his shirt, hungry and alive like a younger woman. He tasted like himself; diet cola and archives. Then he was drawing back, panting. The little light of the moon shone arcs on the black pools of his eyes. “Is this grief or is it us?” 

“I don’t know,” she said, chest heaving. The tide of his hand moved slow against her side. She couldn’t think. “I’ve considered this. I’ve wanted it before.”

“In what way?” he asked, with a serious look. “In a way that makes sense if you thought you were going to live into next year?”

“Honestly, Mulder, I’m not thinking in terms of years.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The cord snapped. His extraction from her required a bomb disposal team to be done without harm. As it was, he tore himself away and it was a cruel shock to them both. She was shaking in more ways than one as she repositioned herself on the couch beside him. 

“If that’s why,” he said, studying hands which had, seconds ago, been testing waters beneath the hem of her shirt, “then we can’t let this be something we need.” It was too late, of course. 

“No need to let me down easy, Mulder,” she said. She cleared her throat, bit down a familiar shame. “Sorry. I always do this.”

“Scully, the fact that I’m forming full sentences should astound you,” he said kindly, dropping forward to catch her eye. “It’s not you. I just think…maybe it would be selfish of us to give in to comfort right now when we’re so close to the truth. We’re distracted by each other enough already as it is. Someone brought it to my attention recently, and at first I was defensive, but now I see that they’re right. I mean, you just spent a whole weekend chasing me around on a bad trip instead of doing something useful with your time. You said it yourself once: two steps forward, three steps back, an endless line.”

“Is this about Diana?” she asked the carpet.

“Diana and I have been separated for months.”

She turned to him then, taken aback.

“Before or after you found out I was sick?” 

“Leave leaping to conclusions to me, Scully. You ever heard of the Japanese art of Kintsugi? Not even a master could repair what was left of us. It wasn’t just you.”

“Mulder.”

“This is why I didn’t tell you,” he laughed warmly. “Correlation, not causation. Isn’t that your line?”

“I’m not sure I believe that rule applies here.”

“Ever the skeptic. You need proof even for this.”

“Especially for this.” She sighed, exhausted. “I wish I could say I’m sorry, but I never understood her neglect of you.”

“You didn’t know her,” he said, firmly, but not upset. “We were strangers by the end, but she was the only friend I had for a long while.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, remembering the rule of wives.

Mulder softened, sidling towards her on the couch, capturing her hands in his. 

“One cell.” He ran his thumb over the space between her eyebrows. “I wouldn’t describe myself as a man with a firm grip on sanity, but I thought it would take more than one malignant cell for me to lose my fucking mind.”

Scully huffed a miserable laugh and her head fell into the open cradle of his palm with an ache she struggled to hide.

“Maybe we needed this tonight,” he said. “I just don’t think we would know how to make it a one-time thing.” He had a voice hushed and gravelly, always just woken up, always in bed and in her ear. She closed her eyes, in quiet anguish. “We’re the only ones who have our fingers on the pulse of the truth, Scully. I know how important it is to you that we honour that responsibility.”

So, this was what he needed of her. And she owed it to him to act like she might survive. He had sent a missile launch through her heart and jolted her awake from years of somnambulism. He had seen her haunted house of a body and enmeshed it with his own. He believed she was mighty. Yes, she owed it to him. She was raised by a stoic woman. This work was sewed in her genes.

Scully stayed through the night, her lap a pillow, his head an alchemical stone. An ambulance made itself known through the streets distantly. The aquarium filter spilled a hum of white noise. She thought about loving him the way she thought about her belief in God, which was to say she didn’t see the point in thinking about it at all. It existed regardless of proof or consequence. She carried it around on her neck. And she loved him, but without future. What now, that there was no future to risk? Kafka had once written to his lover in a state of manic despair, _'Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.'_ Mulder and Scully helped each other, but never quite well enough. The work needed doing, and the work that needs doing always has to be done.

Either way, the night eroded and, miraculously, Mulder drifted to sleep in her lap. His cheeks flushed and he looked younger, coasting in a blue peace. _You never sleep_ , she thought. _Maybe finally you can rest. Maybe finally we can stop pretending we don’t know each other like this._


	8. Everything Floods in at Once

A stage direction. The hand of a would-be god. The conductor’s baton. If, in every life, every train left every station. If batons were guns, if guns were a smoking man. Diana met him in her own apartment. 

“A little nuptial wavering, I can excuse,” he said, slinking in. He liked to make a show of looking around at things, taking catalogue and then capping off his assessment with what Diana guessed was an attempt at pointed underwhelm. She was too old for this. “But, Agent Fowley, divorce was not a part of the deal. I’m afraid you’re of little use to me as an estranged informant.”

She followed him into the living room. The curtains were drawn and only a reading lamp was on. Outside, the sparse ambience of Washington at midnight turned itself on silent out of respect for the dirtily covert. Mulder must have thought her an ocean away. They had not lived so long in the same region of the world since her departure from The X-Files, and in more real sense, they had never been so far apart. 

Diana crossed her arms as her shadow-puppeteer picked a chair to sink into, swinging one leg over the other and already digging through his pockets for the stunt-vice.

“You undermined my partnership with him by introducing a competitor for his trust,” she told him.

At last, he found his habit. A click and a flare, and he was marking his territory like a small dog with folds of skin at every limb-join and no fur. It was a prop, too gimmicky for her tastes. He always waited until he was seated in her best armchair – dark red corduroy upholstery – to light up, made sure she was watching, took a good long suck, and a good long exhale, as if she had the patience for theatrics. Why did the noblest of causes attract the most pathetic of men, and why did the most pathetic of causes attract the noblest of men? She thought of Mulder with this last sweep, missed him with unconscionable ferocity, knowing she was safe to do so in the immutability of her regret. She was walking down the long road alone. She had always been walking, and always down only this road, and always alone.

“It’s true,” said the hairless canine, “that we did not anticipate Agent Scully’s…particular draw on him. But once it was clear that she had become more of an asset to his work than to ours, she was – dealt with.”

“By abducting her – by turning her into another cross for him to bear, you only made their bond more essential and cemented my irrelevance.”

“An essential bond can be threatened in essential ways. Look at him now. He’d do anything to help her.”

Diana was overcome by the ignorance of loveless men. She wanted to say, _You incompetent recluse, you insipid posture of a man. He will never do anything she would hate him for. After her death, he may never to anything ever again._

He sheltered his glowing cigarette with his hand, stoking it with a performative breath, as though the great winds of her frustration had blown through the apartment. She wished he would get to the point, but a conversation with him was a three-act play, and so clearly rehearsed that she wondered if he was not a failed artist, if this was not his one last attempt to orchestrate, his magnum opus of human drama realised palely upon a planetary scale.

“Are you aware,” he said, in his sing-song croak, “that Agent Scully spent the night at your husband’s home recently? They really ought to shut their blinds at night.”

Diana watched his pug’s neck of a face, assessing it for verity. She found only a performance of cool indifference, an aloof appraisal of his long cigarette. Mulder would have said, _Of course you’d think there’s some kind of phallic symbolism in that._ She imagined that girl of a woman relieved at her absence, desperate for her quasi-husband’s attention, hungry for his approval. Diana closed her eyes for the cause. She was so old, well into middle-age and getting older.

“You need to show Mulder his sister,” she said. She told it to the ground, ashamed of her skill. “Or a verisimilitude of her. He won’t sully himself in Agent Scully’s eyes to save her. But he can be destabilised. His beliefs are a strong desire more than a certainty. If you want me back in his favours, I need a window of opportunity. Destabilise his beliefs with empty closure, I can bring him back from that. We don’t have much time. I’d guess a year or two before things get underway, and when they do, I’ll need to be by his side, guiding him along an inevitable path.”

Her listener let her sit with her shame, satisfied with her suggestion, but letting the moment burrow so as to ensure he emerged victorious from her aid. He pinned her under eyes that tried to appear ironic and knowing. He dropped his cigarette, not even one quarter smoked, into a mug of long-forgotten and thoroughly gone-cold coffee on the table beside him, then stood at last to leave. He moved past her, reeking, and making her smell it.

“Your mistake is - ,” she stopped him at the threshold. He turned to her with cool surprise, a joke. “Your mistake has always been in assuming Agent Scully is a pawn rather than a player in her own right. You underestimate the power of a good woman.”

“Careful, Agent Fowley,” he smiled, shuffling his trench-coat on his shoulders. Talking to him was a competition with a child who needed to win. “That savours strongly of jealousy.” The conductor took his bow.

As the door clicked shut behind him, Diana let out a long breath and looked around for relief in the crowded, well-furnished space of an inestimably empty room. Jealousy. Of course he should think so. Some men only knew two reactions to beholding a powerful thing: to covet, or to conquer.

–

He took his last breath at the door, raised his eyebrows jovially in imitation of a smile, and walked the plank into her room. In hospital beds, Scully was as young as she had ever been, no more than twenty-six, speckled and swallowed in thin sheets, sitting up with her hands folded quietly in her lap, a kindly, expectant, brave, unsure little look. He greeted her at a distinctly pre-pubertal octave. She reached through the fog of space between them. It was a respite to touch her. It was the only way they knew how to talk most days of the week. In fact, standing by her bedside, her chilly hand resting in both of his own, it occurred to Mulder that they had only ever spoken to convey the facts of their lives, but, as everything in their work had taught them, the facts held precious little of what they knew and believed to be true.

“You said there was news?” he asked, fiddling with the knuckles of her right hand. He avoided the litmus blue of her eyes. Another blow today would rent him asunder. “Where’s your family? Where’s your mom?”

“They went to get coffee. They’ll be back in a second. Mulder.” It was a summoning. Without meaning to, he rose to the shore of her eyes. Some folklore entailing a lady of the lake and a still, cool blue ebbed in a distant lobe. Physically, there was something incalculably slow about her. She seemed capable of collecting dust. And yet, in her silence, lived an energy so profound that Mulder had a sense of relief at being given some time to receive her.

“Mulder.” Her voice was mercifully soft. “I’m in remission. We’re okay. I’m okay.”

It took a moment. Then he fell to his knees by the bed. She was baptism. He was kneeling, pressing her hand to his brow. She was saying something, trying to lift up his face, but his face was clammed up, torn through by a dry sob, and then he was kissing both of her palms, so proud of her, and crushed by the pain of relief. 

“It’s a miracle,” she said, half-laughing, half-teary herself.

“I’ve been waiting for miracles my whole life,” he said. “Nothing could have prepared me for this.”

“Mulder," she sobered easily, pausing to search him. "Are you okay?”

It was his turn to laugh and he shook his head at her frown, finally the skeptic. 

“Scully, you are....” he tried. Words failing, he went to brush a stray copper lock from her cheek, but the open flush – the living flush! – left in its wake practically begged the press of his lips – and her lips, being so close to her cheek, well, to neglect them would be a waste of resurrected friendship. So he kissed her there too, just quickly. It was less a kiss than a word, a natural gesture of hope. Scully said nothing but let out a little breath. The look on her face as he pulled back was that of pain, eyes lightly closed, and he worried he’d upset her before she recaptured his hands with reassuring firmness. Nodding to himself, he returned her hands to her lap and stood wearily.

“Where are you going?” she asked, twenty-something again.

“I’ll be just outside,” he promised her. He took a moment to relish the last remnants of her open requests for him. “Have some time with your family.”

Scully opened her mouth with an empty an obvious rebuttal, but he silenced her with another thief’s kiss on the cheek, stealing them while propriety still allowed. Then he turned and was gone.

A few hours later, he was still parked outside her room. Every soul who’d ever had the genius-stroke of loving her was inside, gathered round the altar of her bed in celebration, and he was slumped in a plastic chair in the hall. Skinner, even Skinner, had shown up and walked like a nervous lover to her door. Scully made good men bashful. Men who had witnessed guerilla carnage and the torn limbs of a child, she made them as shy as her sons, her brothers, her patients, her pupils of grace.

On his way out, Skinner, that cinder-block of a man, hovered briefly before asking, “How would you feel if Scully moved on from The X-Files?” He had a gruff way of talking that made it seem like he was constantly, impatiently embarrassed at having to make his thoughts known.

“You threatening me, Skinman?” Mulder flipped him, half-hearted wise-assery.

“No, but I think that answers my question.” Then his bowling ball of a head made it’s awkward, hefty goodbye, leaving Mulder starkly alone.

Mulder’s life was in shambles. Not just in the present tense, but in an enduring and penetrating sense, in a way that encompassed everything he had ever known and reached forward to shake the hands of everything he ever would. Listing it plainly seemed the only way to comprehend it: He had found his sister. ( _My father told me that he’d found you._ ) He had lost her again. ( _You wanted to see me very badly._ ) No; she had found him, beneath the lonely glow of an empty diner, and then rejected him within the hour. ( _That you’d been looking for me for a long time._ ) She had been kept from him, knowingly, easily, pointlessly, for years, decades, through every chest pain, every sleepless night, every gulag he had thrown his body into, every bullet and blow he had taken silently, every other life and chance at love he had turned down for her sake. ( _Is that true?_ )

 _Is that true?_ Sometimes, to grit one’s teeth and survive was enough until the waters of hell receded tolerably. Emerging alone, but horribly enriched, celebration was not instinct. Instinct was to let it all flood in at once, finally. Scully was alive. He had almost killed her. He had not saved her at all. _Is that true?_ A happy ending could not account for all the years in between, for decades of withering grief. Grief procured interest, and a return of the original loss made the sum of his debts seem crushing beyond repay. Partial relief was worse pain. _Is that true?_ He never stopped. He never stopped. Not for one second, never – never stopped looking for Samantha. And for what? She had been a few hours away, living without a care. There were no little green men involved. _Is that true?_ As if she had to ask him. As if he could answer. _Is that true?_ He wept. Good god, he was a destitute man.


	9. One Notch Below Bedlam

Just beyond Annapolis, Maryland, Mulder and Scully were play-fighting in the hallway outside their motel rooms. 

“Mulder, whole communities of people don’t just _disappear_.”

“Roanoke,” he said.

“There are _thousands_ of plausible explanations for what happened to the Roanoke Colony, and all the legend surrounding their disappearance is exactly that: legend. Easily chalked up to public imagination.”

“Easter Island.” Bad example. He knew it the moment he said it. She swooped in mercilessly.

“Oh, come on. Extensive archaeological research has well established the extinction of those peoples to be the result of militaristic over-exploitation. I don’t know what it is exactly you’re even suggesting? Mass-abduction?”

“No, not that,” he bristled. Lately, he’d hung up his tin-foil hat. Brilliant absurdity on this planet, he could buy, but he was wavering on the verge of apostasy about all the rest, intergalactically-speaking.

“Mulder,” she squared him, dipping her chin and looking up at him with the same look he’d seen her give Queequeg for chewing open a pillow. Poor bastard of a dead demon dog. He felt a little like a dog these days too. She gave him a tough-love talking to. “These people were engaged in malicious tampering with local water supplies, practicing what I’m sure they believed was some form of craft or hex or black magic on the local townspeople. Radical conservatism taking a radical form; we’ve seen it before. They caught wind of us nosing around and they scattered into the woodwork.”

“Look, Scully, there’s just no way that many families could pack up and leave without a trace overnight! Border police were on alert, we were watching for them, we even checked CCTV footage. Nothing! There’s no way they’ve left the area, let alone the state. So why is there nothing left out in those woods, Scully? No visible trace of them?”

“Then what? An _invisible_ trace?” When he did not answer, the enamoured cynicism in her expression hardened to enamoured vexation. “ _Mulder_.” There were whole dictionaries dedicated to the different meanings she gave to his name.

“All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve encountered evidence of powerful witchcraft.” He was an expert now at humbled innocence and he played it like a player. “We still don’t know what they were doing with the water supply. What if, instead of _affecting_ the good townspeople of Annapolis’ portside, they were _taking affect_ , drawing something out. And whatever they were able to gather gave them the ability to cloak themselves from detection. There are records of a small cult-like colony similar to the one we encountered in those woods, appearing and disappearing every now and again in neighbouring states over the decades. Always deep in the dense forestry of this region. You know this; I gave you the files. Maybe they show up, charge up, and then pack up just in time to avoid getting caught, retreating to a life of blissful anonymity. You’re a physicist, Scully; how much of the world is imperceptible to our range of vision? Who’s to say there aren’t whole ecosystems existing in realms of invisible light.”

For a moment, she was frozen in a look of affectionate incredulity, mouth hanging open in wait of a worthy rebuttal he was confident would never arrive. He laughed, a little embarrassed. She dropped her head forward and was laughing too in a way that was like weeping, shaking her head. They were doing okay these days. The yellow-light of the hallway flickered to signal the end of the evening. Everything smelled like red carpet, although the carpet was a bilious shade of brown. They both took a heavy breath.

“I was, uh, gonna get changed then go for a walk,” she said, looking between his eyes, lips and shoes in the avoidant way she’d been doing recently. “I grew up here, you know. Might do a little sight-seeing, reminiscing.”

He studied her. She used to ask him a million and one questions. When they first met, she had been like a pocket-fire, electrically curious, like a little bullet of intelligence and simmering desire. Now there was something both warm and cool in her, like nuclear volcanic heat hardening immediately into the heatless depths of the ocean. She was either open or closed, familiar or private, needy or distant, he couldn’t tell. She was either obscured by remoteness, or so close to him that she was little more than an encompassing blur. Or she was both, and the combined result was that he knew what he was looking at, but could not trust what he was seeing at all.

“That sounds nice,” he said, cautiously. “I’ll…I’ll see you tomorrow then.” She found his eyes then, and her expression changed unfathomably. He had the sensation of sinking a three-pointer perfectly but in the opposition’s hoop. A thin-lipped smile and a nod and she was gone. He turned and entered his dank hole of a motel room alone.

Over the years they had moved through many phases and were now long past the excitement of potentiality, the now-unimaginable buzz of half-dressed candle-lit exchanges in motel rooms at midnight, having metamorphosed into the realms of unbearably slow hesitance. It was late at night, Mulder had had a long day. His thoughts drifted a certain way. He couldn’t help it. Surely, neither could Scully sometimes. He was myopic but he wasn’t blind. Some days, he got the distinct sense that they were grimy trench-buddies, turning a blind eye to each other’s hot-blooded frustrations and the various shame-ridden necessities enacted to wrangle some meagre relief. Passing back and forth a bummed smoke after they were done and back on the watch. They were grown adults. Machinery needs oil and it gets oiled, one way or another. Mulder was running on fumes most days of the week, sputtering wildly under the strain she put on his engines, but mostly grinding along.

Some nights he had to run away from her. Wine and cheese! He was trying hard to be a gentleman, but he wasn’t a god. That night in the forests of Leon County hadn’t been the only night he’d guarded his special garden by running for the hills, but it had been the closest call. As luck would have it, mothmen were powerful tools of abstinence. And still, despite all his efforts, he’d ended up falling asleep in her arms. He felt like a maiden outrunning the flattering advances of a dashing suitor and was a little proud of himself, actually, for having gotten so far unsoiled. Only, it wasn’t himself he was protecting. Goddamn the world and all its rules and social quagmires and consequences. It was just flesh, just bodies coming together for relief, but he knew that also wasn’t true. It was the meeting of minds that they could not afford. It was the last barrier between Other and Self. They’d see right through each other, he was convinced. He felt the telepathic pull ready for the breach already. He was certain, going for broke with Scully would rewire his brain violently.

But it was more than that too. It was a question of unquestionable guilt. Yes, he was hungry, he had a fire-belly grumble like a roar, and he snacked ceaselessly and could not be sated – but he did not deserve the kind of nourishment he was keening after. Obvious selfishness on his part was the crux of it. He’d taken enough bites out of her life already. Lately he felt she’d offer up a pound of flesh for him to eat if he wanted, and he was beginning to know that was unfair without quite mustering up the gallantry to let her go. So there they were, in limbo. It was all some kind of perverse cosmic foreplay. Summarising it that way felt crude, even to Mulder, but he was feeling crude and hellish and flopped down on his bed, half-starved.

In another moment, he was up again and striding impetuously across the hall to knock on Scully’s door. She appeared, concerned as always, frowning all over him, looking for injury. She’d changed into a faded juniper military jacket and black cargo pants, her hair an autumnal blaze in contrast, and he wondered what kind of ‘walk’ she intended to go on. 

“Mind if I tag along?” he spat out eventually, not knowing he would ask it until he did. He registered her surprise with a twinge of guilt. 

After a moment’s stammering, she said, “Not at all. I’ll- I’ll meet you outside. Just throw on something suited to a short hiking trail.”

“What about merpeople. Or sirens,” Mulder asked. The crunch of mossy pebbles beneath their boots was reassurance enough of a well-trodden path. After their recent woodland misadventure, he was surprised at Scully’s eagerness to be out where the trees had eyes in the middle of the night again so soon. Their flashlights threw lifelines long before them into the dark. Scully easily rebutted him with something about how discovering intelligent life within the vastly undiscovered depths of the ocean was somewhat more plausible than happening upon it in the incomprehensible vastness of space.

They had conversations like playing chess; sometimes, they only picked opposing sides because those were the rules of the game, and, either way, they knew each other so well that it was easy to map the outcomes of every move, playing every possible match in their head out to completion without saying a word. Still, they spoke aloud because it was fun to watch the pieces move across the board, and they lost too much elsewhere already in the paralysis of over-cautious preemption. 

“I just don’t think,” she continued, her breathing coming in sharp, luminescent puffs of Scully ghost-clouds, “that it will look anything like a half-human, half-fish hybrid. Where’s the evolutionary sense in that? I often think about how we wouldn’t recognise intelligent life that doesn’t look human. Consider octopi, for example; they strike me as dangerously sentient. And yet, for the most part, they’re thought of as little more than the pre-fried stages of calamari.”

As she was rambling on in her usual way, Mulder’s boot caught on a crag and he took a stumble. Scully reached for his left elbow as though, being altogether half his size, she could do anything to prevent his fall. He steadied himself and saved them both a mouthful of dirt, but Scully kept a light hook on his upper arm. He suspected she was using him for warmth, so he bent his arm in, tucking her closer as they trudged further onwards.

“I have a hard time letting go of the idea of sirens,” Mulder said, nearly jumping at the sound of a bush rattling somewhere to his right. He busied himself cataloguing mushrooms by flashlight in all their alien-esque charm; in the ground, out of dead stumps, as awnings on a hulk of a trunk. “Sure, I agree with you about the anatomy seeming improbable, but they could exist in some form. I buy the possibility. But as always, I’d need to see it to believe it.”

“That’s where you and I differ, Mulder,” she began, steering them off the main path, downwards along a branched, uneven way. “I don’t need to see something to believe it. I just need to understand the sense in it.”

“You feel there’s sense in religion?” 

It was a curveball tangent. She connected with the ball easily: “God and religion are not the same thing.” He nodded, understanding enough, if not much.

The trail they were on was less marked out than the main one. It was more of a shallow, narrow, waterless ravine than a graveled path. They tottered down steeply, falling silent to concentrate on treading carefully with what little illumination their torches afforded. At the base of the decline, Mulder looked up to find an old, empty storm drain, massive, one-and-a-half times his height, tunneled through a block of clay earth. It was only several yards long and, casting his torch through, he saw the beam emerge out the other end into a thick wood.

He turned questioningly to Scully, who was still huddling close to his arm on the verge of shivering, her hair damp and frizzy at the peripheries, creating a halo of chill-boned and brazen youthfulness about her that took him back to a night in a muddy cemetery in the pouring rain, eons ago. She looked up at him, a memory of rebellion in her eyes, and tugged him forwards.

“I used to come here after school as a teenager. We weren’t allowed, of course, but we came,” she said. She spoke quietly; the sound of her voice reverberated off the cylindrical walls. It smelled like wet earth and dry stone, and the wind whipped all around both entrances without daring to enter. Scully disconnected him from the umbilicus of her arm to go wandering. Mulder ambled his flashlight across the interior, mentally photographing a range of pubescent graffiti markings ranging from the romantic to the anarchical to the unimaginatively pornographic. 

“Here,” Scully called him. Mulder walked over to where she’d lit up a small section of wall at the far end of the tunnel. Approaching, he leaned down and over her shoulder to inspect her finding, a hand lightly on her hip to keep her in place. If he turned his head, he’d make contact with her cheek. Greetings from planet Mulder. On the wall, the letters ‘D. K. S.’ were faded but distinct, laid down in permanent marker beside a range of other initials ending in ‘S.’ The Scully clan.

“That’s my handprint,” she said, quietly, because he was so close to her face she needn’t speak up. Scully placed her small hand against the outline traced sloppily onto the cement. Mulder was witnessing the spell of a lifetime. She was summoning the ghost of herself. Without thinking, when Scully lowered her hand, he raised his to replace it, reaching through time and space to press palm to palm with the Scully of yore.

“I think she likes me,” he whispered, half in jest and half in earnest. Scully breathed a laugh and nudged back into him with her shoulder. He straightened up and followed her as she began dawdling out the other end of the tunnel, swaying into his side companionably.

“We would have been friends,” she admitted. There was no path to speak of on the other side of the tunnel – just bits of earth that were more trodden than the rest, but Scully seemed to know her way instinctually. Was this the Scully natural habitat? 

“I didn’t quite comprehend the concept of friends back in my teenage years,” he said. “Didn’t quite comprehend anything. Couldn’t have seen my own hand in front of my face, I was that buried in my head.”

“Well, the child in us still exists, and we’re friends now – and so are they by extension. Though, by your estimates, we’ve been friends for centuries longer than that.” 

“You don’t believe in past lives,” he reminded her. She was leading him to a sharp incline now, and they had to use their hands to climb up over a hill which morphed up above into a low rock outcropping. The air was ice-knifing his lungs, but he’d broken out into a sweat under all his layers.

“I believe in intergenerational experience,” she said, panting and straining against the climb. “Studies have demonstrated the various ways we carry through the physiological memories of generations past, metabolic adaptations to their life experiences, et cetera. Psychological memory could work the same way. Maybe, historically, your ancestors have known and benefitted from some kind of partnership with a person like me, and maybe that’s what your instincts recognise.” Evidently she took Mulder’s breathless silence for disappointment, for she continued, “But I also believe in souls, and I believe souls can recognise each other, although I don’t know how or wherefrom and I don’t think it’s something the conscious mind can comprehend.”

“Scully, you ever considered working for Hallmark?” he said, too touched to respond seriously. She scoffed at him under her breath.

Other men were at home watching the game. Mulder was blindly crawling and struggling through pitch black treescapes, led by a ginger scientist with a gun-license and the light of a torch he was now having to carry between the chill of his teeth. They had the elements, cold and wet, in their fingernails, the sound of each other’s breaths and boot scrapes in their ears, and the smell of a verdant midnight wilderness in the earthy air all around. Other men were dead compared to him.

At last, they surmounted. Scully torpedoed down a hand to haul him up over the crest, and he took it without putting any weight on her at all, just to take it. She was a wild woman, a sophisticated guide and uncharted, full of jungle survival. Two days earlier, she had been sitting, sober and stiff, in a beige skirt-suit beside him in a car, lamenting pettily over the discomfort of their FBI sedan rental. Two months before that, she had been pallid and animated by a fluttering pulse beneath the death-shroud of hospital quilts. It did not surprise him that she could be all things naturally. She was the either/or of women.

From their new vantage point were three incredible views. The first was a clear view straight over the canopy of surprisingly low trees, outwards and upwards into the canvas melee of the stars. Without light pollution, the Milky Way was visible as a cloudy arc across the inky black spheres. Mulder saw starlight from millions of years ago wink at him in a cheeky premonition beyond the scale of human comprehension. The second view was behind them, on the underside of the rock outcropping which hung so close to their heads that Mulder had to crouch to view it in full. Scully splashed her torch onto the ochre rock. Shadow paints of human figures, hand prints, creatures and weaponry shone out like smoke from a story fire. Art dusted by a man much like himself, centuries ago. Preserved and beholden by him in the same instant as ancient starlight, and in very much the same way. Both were messages being sent to him from the past. Scully must have understood it all better than him; she was showing it to him, after all. He looked between her and the cave paintings and the stars and all three visions gave him such a sense of timeless, intensely human wonder that he had to take a seat on the ledge, swinging his legs down over the slope which they had just climbed. Scully joined him, and they said nothing for a while and felt peace quite unlike anything they had known in recent months – maybe years. Their sides were flush against each other, pressing in and out with each slow, heavy breath.

"I found this place on my own," she told him. "I never showed anyone. When you're young, so little is your own. I only had this one thing. Of course, I never managed to come out here at night. I always knew though, how it would look." Then she fell silent again, gazing into the heavens above.

“Are you praying?” he asked, a wild guess. She turned to him, surprise and a hint of embarrassment in her eyes, then jumped her eyebrows and looked down at her hands. Mulder picked up a Biblical theme. “Can I confess something to you Scully?” This always succeeded in making the Catholic in her deeply uncomfortable. “You’re the only person I’ve ever made confession to.”

She laughed, somewhat unhappily, and quoted, “ _I ain’t a preacher no more_.”

“No you ain’t, Casy. We’re just a coupla sinners on the long narrow road, you and me.” 

They both looked on ahead. Beneath and before them, acres of natural wealth undulated and spilled into the sea a few miles away. Scully was the only warm, living thing in the world. He knew it to be true.

“I’m having doubts, Scully,” Mulder found himself saying, all at once. “I don’t know. Seeing my sister briefly, learning my father may be a dead man and the devil reincarnate, Diana and the divorce, your illness. I don’t know if I trust all those beliefs I’ve staked my life on.” It was the first time he let slip his intentions to go through with the divorce since her remission. To her credit, Scully did little more than glance up at him at the mention. “Didn’t – hasn’t any of this shaken your own beliefs?”

“No,” she said honestly. “Strange enough – or maybe not strangely at all – I think it actually helped me find a form of faith I could live by more truthfully. Not to say that I picked and chose beliefs to suit my own needs. I think I just changed my needs. I don’t feel the same fear and shame as I did before. I don’t see the sense in it. Not before a higher power, anyway.”

“Aren’t you at all interested in proof of whether or not God exists?” he asked, and felt he had asked it before – felt maybe he was asking a different question through this one, a question not about God at all.

“Your question is based on a false assumption,” she humoured him, understanding the wider application in her Scully, intuitive way. She spoke softly so as not to disturb the stars. “Here’s how I see it: people who don’t believe in God are acting on a null-hypothesis. That means the baseline proposition is ‘God does not exist’ and the subsequent trial - testing variables, analysing results for significant evidence, discussions of errors and biases - are done in the belief that the only way to prove God exists, is to disprove that he doesn’t. That’s a null hypothesis. On the other hand, if you believe in God, you’re not looking for anything. The proof is everywhere.”

“I understand that. What I’m asking is, why is it that to you, proof is everywhere - that an apparent miracle or a religious script is hard evidence of God’s existence - while to me, they’re nothing at all.”

“Because I believe in them.”

“So the difference is just that you want to see it as proof, and so you do. Sounds familiar.”

“Whether the truth is that I want to or just that I’m able to is, of course, a matter of opinion.”

“A critical one, one on which you and I must definitionally differ. Eh, Casy?”

“I think so,” she agreed, and the look on her face was warm.

There was a pause, and Mulder, laying bare all his doubts, thought of another which had been picking at him.

“Scully,” he managed. Her eyes were always on his mouth. “Skinner mentioned something recently about you moving on from The X-Files. Hypothetically. Is that…something you’ve considered recently?”

She shook her head, looking down at her hands. “Maybe last year. But now, as long as I am needed, I just want to stay.”

On this last note, she hazarded a look up at him. The moon made a lake of her eyes. Not long ago, she had looked at him the same way. He was having trouble forgetting. The black well of her pupils under the slim moonlight of his apartment, her body wedged between his and the couch, the sharp intake of breath in his ear as he’d ventured just below the hem of her shirt, the lift of her hip-bone into his palm and the deprived sigh, the way she writhed and moved beneath him with the need of a much younger woman, the slippery pillow of her lips and the glide of her bold, careful tongue over his mouth. The cautious heat of her struggling hands. Not so long ago.

He had trouble forgetting other things too. Blood on a philtrum. A hyperpigmented patch of X-Ray. Maggie Scully, red-eyed and fearsome. Diana righteous and trembling with cruel honesty. Scully begging to take the fall for him on her deathbed. Scully laying herself on the line year after year after harrowing, wasted, fruitless year. Her ova in a tube in a laboratory fridge under his name. The depravity of his innumerate and still-growing needs from her, constantly, all the time, in every imaginable way. He stood up desperately.

“We should head back,” he said, shivering. Scully took a moment, then rose, leading the way silently.

Some time later, they were exhausted to the bone, arriving back at the motel. The gust of warm air at reception was thawing and sublime. Mulder saw Scully, still too slim from neoplastic cachexia, revived by the cheek-glow of warmth.

“Did you eat? You eat dinner?” he asked, a recently formed habit.

She nodded reassuringly as they made their joint-aching way down the hallway towards their rooms.

“Ever since my body figured out it was going to survive, the basic urges have slowly but surely returned.”

“I have a video with the title _Basic Urges_ back home,” Mulder said, another habit. 

“Then I’m sure you know what I mean.” He glanced over at her, oddly delighted and unsure. She was smiling privately down at the mud-cake march of her boots. They were on a dangerous ledge.

Outside their rooms, they stopped, forced to countenance with a daily necessity. They turned to face each other, stiffly. Scully’s arms hung by her sides, hands exposed, and such an energy stalled between them that Mulder felt the sudden possibility that she might sweep him into her arms or say something brave. But he knew her better still. It was not in Scully’s nature to be swept away. Neither of them dared move, and they froze with all the feeling of their silence, held together, torn apart. It was wrong to say that love of any kind - romantic, sexual, platonic, familial - had the power to change a person’s nature. It only overwhelmed their nature, made them paralysed under a heightened burden of themselves. A million opportunities passed in a forsaken moment of inaction between Mulder and Scully that was all the more true to their affection than any overture of love. They would see each other again the next day, and their heightened fondness grappled with heightened rationality as they decided that restraint was all the moment could afford.

“So, how do we say goodnight?” Mulder said, with just enough flirtation that the innocence of his intent was made clear. Scully dropped her gaze, smiling tiredly.

“Goodnight, Mulder,” she said. Checkmate.

-

Diana knew already the consequences of the phone call she was about to make. She had been hoping to avoid this route. It struck her has too cruel, even for the greater good. She dialed through anyway. A click, and a dead man picked up the phone, smoking even from beyond the grave.

“He sent through divorce papers this morning,” she said evenly.

“That _is_ inconvenient,” came the phantom reply. “No matter. Perhaps destabilisation, as you put it, only works if the ground has shifted beneath _both_ of their feet. Fortunately, I have knowledge of a little girl whose discovery should do the trick buying some time for the slow window of opportunity to open wide enough for your return.” He hung up.

He sounded hoarser and breathless, but alive, miraculously. When she’d found him, shot and strewn across a musty living room floor, there had been more blood than any one man should be able to bleed. There had been a picture of her soon-to-be ex-husband in his hands.

How fitting, she’d thought then, that they should both love a man who they should both do better to hate. How fitting that in loving him so, they caused him unendurable pain.


	10. A Cosmic Mother Watching Through a Spray of Stars

The thing about children was that they had fat cheeks. Some days Scully felt that to press her cheek to the silky fat cheek of a baby would fix her life. The thing about children was that they wanted you to be selfish in love. They wanted you to love them above all other productive things. The thing about children was that you could teach them about the life-cycle of a frog and the difference between cucumbers and zucchinis and how to ride a small bike. You could show them Cassiopeia and watch their reaction to tapping the mouth of a Venus fly-trap with a twig and tell them the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears after decades of forgetting the magic of a whispered bedtime tale. The thing about children was that they taught you too; reminded you of the wonder of a coloured building block and the chaotic joy of chasing a naked toddler around the house for bath-time and the transfixing rapture of watching a grown man go cross-eyed and puff out his cheeks over and over again. To have a child was to live again, to have your own heart walking outside your body, to be resuscitated on the shores of old youth and sputter out lungfuls of taxes and disillusion and morning traffic and every other burden stealing the memory of simple wonder from your life.

The thing about Emily was that she was hers. She was Scully’s to love. And god she was so smart, she was a little genius, that girl, and quiet and sober and probably mischievous in an evil and innocent way if given the space and time. Scully knew her with a look. She was a tiny scientist, absolutely brilliant and grave and thinking her sombre thoughts. And she loved Mulder, that bright little Scully-blood child, loved nobody else. Only Mulder sparked her skeptic, curious eye. She brought out the side of Mulder that Scully had seen when they had first met; the tender, bewildered uncertainty. She brought out his childhood memories of the ability to love someone and it made him so warily beautiful. She was a little sailor girl. She had an elvin intelligence. She understood everything. Scully thought about taking her out on a boat on a yellow-sun beach, seeing her petite co-captain perched on the bow, frowning at a map which required the entire wingspan of her fat little arms to hold out, the wind blowing back the lip of her bucket hat. Despite herself, she saw Mulder there too, seasick on the starboard, hauled along because Emily was enamoured with that lanky and difficult man.

There would be no boat and no yellow-sun beach. Her daughter was a very sick little girl.

The thing about children was not having to dole out affection at appropriate times. It was being able to give your whole life away, and to have it eaten up with chubby little fingers unabashedly. To have them fall sleep slung over your hammock torso, their fat cheek slotted into the crook of your neck, and to know this was the one right use of a body. The thing about children was being born decades ago with so much love in your heart and nowhere to invest it without consequence until they came along. Suddenly, just when Scully had thought the future barely lasted into next week, she had been given a second chance – she’d survived on death row – and it made her hungry to love without reserve. There was nowhere to put it all. She’d tried Mulder, but he was holding onto something and it left her out in the cold. Then, Emily – and the overflow of love she’d been collecting in shot glasses became a rivulet of love into a canyon and the blood of her heart was toddling around all day, expecting her to be quiet when her baby doll was asleep. 

Scully’s daughter looked exactly like the one woman she would give her right arm to see again in this life; Melissa had never wanted children of her own but she would have seen the way Emily reached for Scully’s necklace and said, _You two have the same souls._ They did, Scully knew. Emily may have looked like Melissa, but she had Scully’s unspeaking Sight. They saw each other and recognised. They were swiftly inseparable. They searched each other thinking, _Haven’t I loved you before?_ On the one night they had together before the unspeakable, Scully cautiously lay beside her little one. She ran her thumb over the impossibly smooth skin of her cheek, and Emily closed her eyes and settled into her side. It was a small miracle. Scully found herself on the verge of tears over the size of Emily’s nostrils. She felt herself falling asleep beside someone that loved her for the first time in years. How long had she gone on this way? Then she saw that her world had been closing in on itself and that this was the last true thing that belonged wholly to her, the last thing that she was willingly, openly, and inexplicably owned by. _If you want me, I’m yours_ , she thought. _There’s so much in me that I have had nowhere give._

She was doing everything wrong. Her mother thought she was deluded and tragically barren. Her brother thought her life was a tumour of emptiness. Only Mulder believed her and fought for her love, and even he flinched at being mistaken for the father. He flinched, and yet, while she was holding everyone at gunpoint and asking to speak to every manager and gone wild with aimless terror for that little girl, she was sure he was off doing the same. And Emily, brave and trusting, was locked into all manner of chambers and beds. Scully remembered the leaden isolation of an MRI scan. The rapid fire drown-out, the feeling of being buried alive, the sensation that you were calm and completely, blindly alone. Melissa would have called this all fate, but fate was the poison of choice, and choice was the only thing Scully had left to clutch. Who would have chosen this life for a child?

Later, in the hospital bed, when the worst was about to come, Scully whispered, “I love you,” easily. She took no risk in doing so. The liberation of that ease broke her heart. She could not remember the last time she had said the most human of things, not without fear or reserve. Emily, by then, was too weak to speak. Her brow, when kissed, came away salty and cold. She had a handful of Scully’s hair in her knowing little fist. Scully pressed her cheek to the silky fat cheek of her child and it broke her life in one go. Scully said it again, said I love you. She said, “I always love you this much.”

The thing about children was that they were not meant die. Not every child was conceived out of love but every child deserved to be born into it. The thing about children was they did not lash out against death. They felt no anger or injustice at their own suffering. They understood that what was, must be. Having just emerged from it, they were far less opposed to or confused by the idea of returning to the world of souls. Their carers ran in a wild panic and became the ones who needed caring for. The thing about children was that no child should be created to die. No child. And no parent could endure knowing that they were. And of course, to love a child was a love that survived horrifically. A mother was a mother before she had seen or held her child. She was a mother without giving birth. She was a mother from the moment the first inkling of love occurred to her mind.

Scully was a mother at the coffin. Scully was a mother standing over her daughter’s grave. The pain was hers, and always would be, and she nursed it at her breast like a babe. No one could take that from her. It was the only choice she had been given. She wore it like a holster. She held it like a gun at her throat. This horror belonged to her life. This distance was hers to cross alone. The distance that could never be wrenched between a mother and child, that was a rope between two made of one. She had almost had that love in her life. She had seen how unfiltered that love could be. How quiet and inexhaustible, how wise and how pure. Now she knew. The devastation of knowing how good. She held her daughter in a golden cross and wore that cross on her neck. A sepulchre at the base of her throat. She wept inconsolably against a brick wall behind the Church after the funeral. Mulder paused when he found her. He came close, stood over and around her like a black cloak, enveloping with a sympathy verging on rage and shielding her from the Eyes. She swiped angrily at her cheeks. Like a slow ghost, he raised a hand touch her pendant. It glinted between his finger and thumb. His knuckles rested on the skin of her throat, and his sombre weight was beyond all reasonable grief. Mulder was her son, her husband, her lover, the man keeping her in the dark. He was none of those things. He did not belong to her. That was a choice he had made. She touched his wrist, begging him to let go. He saw the black rage in her mythic sorrow and left her with difficulty – silent, sorry – to wait in the car. Emily was hers alone. Not even her old friend Death could take that away.


	11. While the Father Storms Through Adjacent Rooms

Patients with acute heart failure are clinically profiled based on the presence or absence of fluid congestion and/or hypoperfusion. There are four profiles: warm-dry, the healthiest of the four; cold-dry, in which the extremities of the body are not being well perfused and the patient enters an icy delirium; warm-wet, in which the patient is well perfused but fluid is also being congested in places it should not be, such as the lungs or liver, drowning the body from the inside; and cold-wet, which is both – the patient can’t get enough fluid, they have enough, they have too much, it’s in the wrong places, it’s drowning them, it starves them out.

-

Warm-dry like the little white lies they rehearsed in the countdown to her return from Maine; _I didn’t miss you_ , and _I didn’t miss you, too_ , and _I didn’t cry on the jetty over my daughter and watch the way my tears added nothing to the ocean and the sky wasn’t as silver as the sea and that didn’t remind me of the grey in your eyes when it rains_. Warm-dry like the hard jab she served Mulder’s ribs under the table of some mid-highway diner corner booth as reproachment for his _Invisigoth sure worked up your appetite, huh, firecracker?_ eye-brow wiggle. Scully could admit the girl had reminded her of someone. _A college girlfriend?_ She’d never had one. _A college fling?!_ She said, “You know how it is.” Mulder searched her for a moment, a response frozen on his lips, then they turned back to their stale club-sandwich dinners and the hearty nutrition of a shared cheesecake shake. A few years earlier, they might have traded old college war-stories, cracked open the sarcophagus of shared mythic, mummified, long-dead loves. But then there was the fact that all loves, all women, all stories reminded her of Emily and it cut her laughs off short those days like the power blacking-out in the middle of a TV show. Warm-dry like the jostle and tug of pretending to want anything more from that Porphyric hill-billy sheriff than a little carrot to dangle over Mulder’s blindfolded head, the old nag of a Philadelphia-set rebellion, an inked declaration of want, this time far less venomous.

Warm-dry like Mulder galumphing into her motel room the first night of their week on a clear-cut case in backwater Ohio. Karen Cai was found bruised and battered on the floor of her school gymnasium with no memory as to how she had gotten there or who had attacked her in the middle of the night. A week later, she began claiming the ghost of her senior prom date’s recently dead ex-girlfriend was haunting her and attempting to secure her untimely company in the eternal shadow-life via increasingly life-threatening visitations. Witnesses reported the ex-girlfriend, Jessie (killed in a tragic swimming accident on a boozy riverside night with a bunch of kids from the high school earlier that year), and the boyfriend, Ramon (quarterback with daddy-issues and his future hanging on a football scholarship), had had an infamously rocky, often eruptive relationship. Ramon’s budding romance with Karen Cai was showing indications of heading in a similarly fiery direction. He could not account for his whereabouts on the nights of Karen’s attacks though he claimed to be “Just driving around. The fuck do you want me to say? That’s what I was doing.” Teachers reported he had been falling behind in school and had, more than once, been pulled up by the coach on over-aggression on the field. He and Karen had recently fought very publicly over Karen spending too much time with one of her male classmates outside of school. Every iota of tangible evidence was pointing towards Ramon. 

“You don’t think he did it,” Scully cut short in a tone devoid of her old curiosity. Mulder no longer scandalised her good sense. He was leaving a trail of workday attire across her floor, hopping one-legged towards her bathroom with one foot caught in a pant-leg. She switched to a whine: “Mulder, what are you doing? You have a shower in your room.”

“Hormone-riddled teenage angst? Nap-time. Vengeful prom night ghost? Somebody get out the double-buttered popcorn.” He wrestled free of his trousers at last and stood with his maple upper half, now bare of his singlet, poking out the bathroom door. “No peeking.” Then slipped inside. He started the shower up and let out a yelp at what Scully assumed was an unexpected spray of cold water. He always did that, like a kid repeating a joke that made their parent smile once five years ago over and over until it turned into a nag. (Laughing reminded her of Emily.)

“You think this is a _Carrie-Ghostbusters_ cross-over with a half-baked love-triangle tossed into the mix?” she asked, hollering over the sound of the shower.

“Can’t hear ya!”

She groaned and peeled herself from the bed, still dressed in a black pantsuit and heels. On her way to the bathroom, she kicked off her pumps to join Mulder’s clothes on the carpet, forming a collage of a hasty rendezvous that that mocked the chastity of her convent reality. Edging into the bathroom, she paused just long enough to make sure Mulder had drawn the shower-curtain before trudging in and seating herself down on the edge of the bathroom sink. Legs dangling, hair reacting voluminously to the ocean of steam pouring out from Mulder’s sauna of a shower, she had the distinct impression of being five years younger, bushy-haired, bright-eyed, untarnished in Oregon and every other state in the world.

“Are you suggesting,” she repeated, in earshot, “that this quote-unquote ghost is in pubertal, jealousy-fueled oestrus?”

“The birds and the bees, Scully.” 

Steam formed its own weather-system within the microcosm of that dank bathroom. As musty clouds shifted and sifted under the yellow overhead light, Scully caught the silhouette of Mulder’s body through the curtain. He was slim and lithe. He washed his hair like a woman, craning his neck backwards under the shower-head, hands tracing the arc over his face and head and chest. Scully turned her attention to her hose-trapped toes and kicked her legs to and fro idly. It was nothing.

“Well, what do you think it is?” Mulder called, eventually. He was always testing her, always yapping on, always right, always holding back his hand, a royal flush and a joke in his eyes. It was impossible to impress him, hard just to keep up with him. He was always throwing her curve-balls. You had to be brilliant to throw a curve-ball; curve-balls necessitated understanding the underlying straight-ball. He knew everything, he understood even more. She was constantly studying – her field and his – just to stay afloat, and she never knew how or when he managed to squeeze in the time, but there was no way he could be that intelligent without extensive and constant study of his own. She didn’t believe his claim to the Eidetic, but every day - every day she grew less sure.

“I think,” she said, bracing for rebuttal, “this is a simple projection of grief and fear, maybe post-traumatic stress. A case of intimate partner violence manifesting as an imagined intruder, a coping mechanism for a more horrific truth.”

“Projections? What is this, a drive-in movie theatre?”

“Ockham’s Razor. The simplest answer is most probable.”

“Availability bias. The most probable diagnosis distracts from life-threatening differentials.”

“Mulder, are you using my shampoo?” The scent of sudsy peach blossomed through the rolling vapour. Her interlocutor fell silent for once in his mile-a-minute life. “Mulder, stick out your head!”

“Which one?” She bit back a snort. Then; “It just smells s’goddamn fresh, Scully. I mean, it’s the nineties. What’s good enough for Elton John should be good enough for me.”

“Have _any_ of your showers been broken in _any_ of the motels we’ve stayed at these past few months?” she asked, keying in to a pattern that hours of autopsy-induced exhaustion had bade her overlook. Mulder stuck his head (the big one) out of the curtain, pulling it tight under his chin so it framed his face. He’d sculpted his shampoo-soaped hair up in one long spike and wore a wide, idiot grin. (The child in him reminded her of Emily.)

“You owe me a few pizzas worth of shampoo,” he said, suddenly deadpan, then ducked back into the shower. She knew he’d keep his theories to himself until the climax of the scene. She believed him, she believed anything these days, she didn’t care. The more she believed, the less fun it was for him. He took a page out of her book for every chapter she took out of his. He was chafing against her. She needed to have him around.

Later when he was warm and dry and bundled up on top of her bed, she used his wallet to pay for a pizza she’d ordered while he was changing. Skinner would not approve of their recent habit, if he knew, of sharing rooms and showers and dinners, et cetera, but they were so clear of any previous licentious enticements that they might as well have been two geriatrics playing bingo in their shared retirement-home dorm. That’s how it felt, those days. Mulder shot Scully an impressed and faux-threatened look as she handed his wallet back, already digging into a pepperoni slice.

“You left your stuff on my floor,” she shrugged, mouth full. “And you owe me a few shampoos worth of pizza.”

-

Cold-dry like when she did not trust the glass in his eyes during that goose-chase follow-up Modell hunt and it made him bitter and brash. Cold-dry like when he returned the favour as she started seeing seraphic visions of her daughter, bereft again, and his tender dismissal lay her under a glacier alone, packed down under his feet. 

Cold-dry like the hard rap on her door she took as a substitute for, _Good morning, Scully. Have a nice night?_ Some days he wanted to have fun, shower in her shower, eat pizza on her bed. Some days he woke her up with a cold-call and the passive-aggressive prompt of the engine starting up just beyond her motel door. She rushed to pull on a coat, tripping over the threshold and cursing Mulder under her breath. She’d had time only to brush her teeth and, judging by the way Mulder sat emptyhanded in the passenger seat with one leg tucked in to rest on the dash, he hadn’t thought to grab her food or coffee in all the time he’d had to sit and wait for her to hurry up. Some days he was more considerate than she knew what to make of. Some days, god forbid she take five seconds to drink a glass of water. Sometimes it was her that was bitter. Some days she got no joy with him, and less than none without, and she made him feel it well.

On the road, Mulder rattled off a to-do list in the fashion of a 60s Maddison Street man dictating to his girl typist. The town itself was a hull, a ghost town, so to speak. Littered alongside the main road from the motel towards the main part of town – wherein lay the high school, strip mall, doctor’s office – were battered old RV’s and shanty stalls adorned with torn open bin-liners. In every half-curtained, half-shattered window was a hollow face. Eyes followed them down that bleary, steel-sky road. Autumn hit early. Every tree was a skeleton’s hand. The grass and dirt were grey, and the road and the trees and the silver car and her suit, everything grey and shining. 

“I’m thinking we’ll hit the school first, make the rounds. Casper meets Wendy meets, uh…” Mulder gave up on his own joke. He paused to take weary breath and rub the bridge of his nose, making an indifferent gesture with his free hand, “You know. Then I’ll see what we can do about exhuming Jessie Lawrence’s grave. Gonna be a real pain in the ass, considering her parents are God’s favourite customers. You can head to the medical centre, see what they made of the samples from under Karen Cai’s fingernails. Take a look at her if you can, but I don’t know how fresh her injuries will be by now. Jeez, this town is a dump.” 

He was grimacing out the window. At a glance, Scully could tell he hadn’t slept well. Often, it was better for him not to sleep at all than to have sleep interrupted by something unkind. She knew the look. He was seeing Samantha, dreaming of her in the night.

“You get all that?” he asked, flicking her a glance. She took issue with his tone, having been woken up on the wrong side of the bed herself, but she swallowed it down, gave a nod. On her right, they passed a sign reading _Rookwood Children’s Cemetery_. It was the fifth cemetery they’d passed on the one main road. A quick assessment through the bones of trees lining its perimeters revealed a land-lot just as unkept and dilapidated as every campervan park they’d seen. Scully suppressed a death rattle.

“Why are there so many cemeteries here?” she asked. “It’s like someone swapped out every gas station in town for a graveyard.”

“Beats me.” Mulder was chewing on the tip of his tie restlessly. He spat it out, bored. “Must be a quirk of the county. Funny what small towns’ll play up for tourism. Betcha on Halloween this place is like Walmart, Black Friday.”

“No wonder kids think they’re being haunted by some- Oh god!”

Scully swerved off the road into a ditch, tires screaming. They came to a whiplash halt. Winded by the seatbelt, she battled her way out of the car, running back to the road in search of what she’d seen lying across the faded double line. She was at the spot, kneeling over it, gasping for air and breathing in wisps of her own hair. But she was gone. She had been right there, in a little scarlet coat and glossy maroon Mary Janes. Scully was repeating her daughter’s name over and over under her breath, running her own hand over the icy road as though Emily might have sunk into the tar, white in her panic and dizzy on breathlessness. A hand on her back sent her leaping half to her feet, arms braced for a blow. Mulder was stooped and frowning, arms out warily to calm her. She sunk then, snapped back and covered her eyes with her hand, sucking in sharp air as Mulder helped her to her feet.

“Fuck, Mulder. I’m so sorry. Fuck me.”

“Scully, you alright? You okay?” 

He was guiding her by her elbows towards the car, bent down low so his hair swiped over her temple.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. The sun-” She remembered it was overcast. They arrived at the car and she leaned on the side door, avoiding his eyes. “I thought I saw something.” Mulder was nodding, wordless and waiting for her to continue, unsure. “You drive. You drive the rest of the way.”

“What did you see?” he pressed, reaching for her again.

“Nothing.” She moved from him to enter the car from the other side. Seated and shivering, she kept her gaze determinedly out the window, watching that small patch of road. Mulder was quiet and tense with concern. She turned to him without meeting his face. “Mulder, please, would you start the goddamn car?”

He waited a moment, and sleet settled in the silence between them. She knew he resented her grief because it made him feel guilty and she resented his resentment because it made her feel guilty about her grief, and they both knew their resentment was a measure of their love while giving no hint as to the nature or tangible possibilities of that love. They entered a shared fugue state. Scully had a memory of walking to her mother’s house in the dead of the night, her heels clutched by the strap on the day she thought Mulder had burned alive in the Navajo dirt. Lately, she was always walking that midnight road barefoot, and Mulder was right there beside her, the both of them walking, crawling on their knees, helping each other up, rubbing each other’s backs as they took turns grunting and retching on the sidewalk, and then hating each other for whatever kept them walking ever on. 

Mulder sighed and turned the car key to ignition in cloudy, bleak Ohio. The engine revved and the wheels tottered over the curbside back on to that grey as ice road.

-

Warm-wet like the humiliating tear she brushed off her cheek on the shoulder of her coat in the pitch black catacomb of Mulder’s apartment. She was kneeling in front of where he sat slumped in his couch, strapping up the roughened, exposed sinew of his life-giving hand. He raised his spare palm to her face, running a thumb over the thin dermis of her under-eye. He was studying her, a quiet glistening silhouette of a man. Dropping her head, Scully ran off a sailor’s daughter’s ream of cuss-words attached to his name. _Fuck you, Mulder. Take care of yourself for me._ He palmed the back of her hair. She pressed her eyes closed and rested her brow on his knee. Warm-wet like the pain of a good man, schizophrenic and hospital bound, telling her in earnest she was the only spark in the world.

Warm-wet like the night in crap-heap Ohio that Scully shot up in a cold-sweat from her cardboard-adjacent motel bed. Through the dark, she saw her; Emily by the adjoining door, crouched down to peer under the sill. The girl turned back to her mother, a cherubic look of quiet, child-like concern for the man sleeping on the other side. Even now, she loved him in her grave, little way. Scully opened her mouth to ask what the matter was, then there was a muffled shout from Mulder’s room. She leapt from the bed instinctively, unsurprised to find Emily was gone by the time she looked back to the threshold. In a moment, she was in a hastily thrown on robe and through the partition, over by Mulder’s bed. He was sat up and in a cold-sweat too, both of their skins shining blue under the parking lot lamp-light of that cold, ungodly hour. Their breaths came hard. He was not alarmed to see her there. In fact, Mulder was searching her as though she might be able to ground him, work through some theorem or tug him out of a maze. Unthinking, she’d reached to touch his leg over the covers, kneeling by the bed. He anchored onto her hand with both of his, falling back onto his pillow, panting. They were ten nights into the Karen Cai ghost-hunting case, and it was not the first time she’d heard him wake up that way; it was not the first time she’d woken up that way herself. But it was the first time she’d known it was worse than the others – Emily had told her as much. The ghost town was getting to them.

Ten minutes later, they were both slouched over the coffee table in Mulder’s room, huddled close and drinking insipid on-the-house tea. Mulder was in a cable-knit sweater, sweating and shivering, and she was leaning against his side unconsciously, drunken on fatigue. They had the look of shell-shocked men.

“Maybe it’s the lack of sleep,” Mulder offered, voice hoarse. He raised his mug to his lips in a daze.

“I’ve been sleeping fine most nights,” she said.

This received a thoughtful hum in response.

“You really think this town’s haunted?” Mulder asked, angling his face towards her. He smelled of pyjama flannel and yesterday’s remnants of his musky aftershave. “Or – was that _my_ theory?”

“Places aren’t haunted, Mulder. People are,” she told him, burning her tongue on her tea. “Everyone sees ghosts. I see them all the time. I know what they are.”

“You see ghosts?”

She glanced up at him and then askance, unsettled by the sincerity of his confusion.

“Ghosts, phantoms, whatever you might call them – they’re reflections of oneself, not another,” she said.

“You know, doc, there’s actually a difference between a phantom and a ghost, psychologically speaking. A phantom is something missing. A ghost, a ghost wants something from you.”

“It’s both, Mulder. Loss, _and_ a mutual or unreciprocated wish. Human sorrow and trauma don’t abide by the definitions of popular mythology, or the five stages of grief, for that matter.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re ravin’ to a loon, here. Half the time I’m just regurgitating mumbo jumbo, like you.”

“Right,” she said, and understood. “You were dreaming of Samantha.”

Mulder took a deep breath and the side of his chest expanded against her, making her drowsy.

“It wasn’t a dream, Scully, it was a voice. Right before your remission, I believed Cancer Man showed me my sister. Now, I don’t know what to believe, but that voice is telling me I haven’t found her yet.”

“And you trust that voice?”

“Ever since that first night, the night Samantha was taken from me, I’ve had that voice in my head. Guiding me, like a friend. It has always told me the truth. I want to believe it. I believe it more than anything else I’ve seen or learned to be seemingly incontrovertible these days.”

“Well I don’t have a voice, I just have you,” she said, mostly without thinking, and partly because hearing Mulder talk about his sister loosened the cork on all her love. Mulder breathed a laugh and dropped his head, humbled. She watched him with a serious curiosity.

“I’m not sure those things are all that different,” he said, and took another tired breath. In the silence that followed, they both shuffled on the periphery of an uneasy sensation. 

Scully cleared her throat; “It’s two in the morning. What’re you gonna do after your tea?”

“Learn how to say, ‘My dog’s name is Eenie-Weenie,’ in Cantonese. You?”

“I’ll head back to sleep after this cup,” she said quietly. Mulder nodded, assessing her at close range.

“So,” he said, “you see ghosts?”

“You don’t?” she returned, meeting his gaze for the first time since finding him in his bed.

“No,” he said, and the candour in his voice took her aback. “That’s why I go looking.”

The next morning, Scully awoke with a start and a twinge in her neck, the seam of Mulder sweater sleeve imprinted into her cheek. It took her a moment to realise they’d both fallen asleep slumped forward onto his coffee table, using Mulder’s left arm as a pillow. She stood gingerly and left him, and dressed silently in her room for another day’s work.

-

Cold-wet like Mulder in the parking lot outside the warehouse where he thought he’d seen Scully shoot herself under the sway of Linda Bowman’s mind. “Mulder, I think you’re having a panic attack,” Scully had told him, helplessly rubbing circles over his back as he doubled over beside the car, coughing violently. “Mulder,” she tried again, more urgently. He crashed into her, and they stumbled together to stay upright as he grappled for a hold, wracking sobs against her. He soaked her shirt collar through until they were both heaving and covered in sweat. Scully had her proud and wrathful chin propped up on his shoulder, bold and fierce under the weight of her friend. She fought the urge to ask him, “What about what I’ve lost?” She fought the urge to storm back into the warehouse and shoot Bowman between the brows before the medic team arrived. The next day her back was sore from the strain of holding Mulder up for so long, but it was the closest she had felt to him since the day before her remission. The next day, too, he was as cold to her as he had been the day before. Cold-wet like spiraling into joint insanity. Cold-wet like always coming away with more loss.

Cold-wet like fighting in the car as Mulder flew them along the trashy highway from the motel to the high school gym at three in the morning after a vague emergency distress call from the sheriff regarding Karen Cai. It was the night before prom.

Mulder was spouting nonsense about spectral violence as if they had agreed that was the culprit. All evidence still pointed to Ramon. Karen herself admitted to getting into a ‘tussle’ with him the day before the first attack.

“Jessie’s ghost appears to attack only at night. We still have a few hours until daylight so all we can do for now is to keep her away from that gym until we figure out-”

“Mulder, no! We need to go after Ramon and his friends. You- you have to admit there is something distinctly _Turn of the Screw_ about this ghost story! Karen Cai is the only witness, which I can believe once, but not this many times. There’s too much convenient concealment. We’re chasing some kind of ectoplasmic Snuffleupagus and it feels as though we’re being kept deliberately in the dark.”

“What about what we’ve seen in this town, Scully?” he snapped. His voice was raised and he was careening around the corner, parking diagonally across several spots in front of the school. “Why are you fighting me on this? You’re the only person entitled to visions around here, is that it?”

“Look, Mulder, I may believe in you. Okay? But in order to support that belief I have to defend your work to a whole hierarchy of authorities desperate to make us ridiculous.”

They both shot out of the car and slammed their doors, squaring up in front of the hood, breaths thundering.

“You know what, Scully?” Mulder said, clenched and shimmering. “As much as I love this back and forth we have where you do your job and I act like Doc Brown on an oracular kick, making your life miserable, for once, let’s just skip to the part where we agree to disagree, get to this high school, and wrap up the case, so you can spend your Friday night struggling to explain how the hell I was right again in your little reports, and I can spend mine filing for a fuckin’ divorce. How’s that sound? ‘Cause I appreciate you keeping me out of the unemployment line or prison or - let’s be honest - a mental ward, but I’ve got a headache to rival Pompeii, and all I want to do is help Karen Cai live to make it to senior prom. Is that okay?”

Scully held his gaze with all the fury of a sheet of ice cracking off in tonnes to land in the Arctic. 

“Mulder, if you don’t want me to do my job…then why the hell am I still here?”

Just then, a scream snapped them both into action. They ran in immediate synchrony towards the school, guns and flashlights drawn. Blue light shone out from every window, and the light made a heavenly sound.

-

Karen Cai was found dead in her prom dress, tossed under the bleachers. She had been beaten and assaulted beyond recognition. Samples of Ramon’s tissues and secretions were found all over her body and under her nails. Ramon was found dead also, hung around the neck by a Prom King sash from one of the basketball hoops, covered in occult wounds. There was no explanation for his death or evidence of a culprit, except for freeze-burns on his lips, as though he had been given the kiss of death.

Mulder kneeled beside Karen’s corpse for a long time without speaking. Every girl was his sister. Every girl was her daughter. Every girl was Scully herself. She watched from a distance, calling the police and medical team, hoping Emily didn’t show up to see this.

On the way back to the motel, Mulder didn’t say a word. Scully drove. Within the walk from the car to their rooms, she saw his body grow increasingly rigid and slow until he could not take another step. She moved quickly to sling his arm over her shoulders just before he fell, holding him haggardly upright as she grunted and shoved open the door to her room with her side. A second later, they were slouched shoulder to shoulder on the edge of her bed. Mulder had one hand over his eyes and the other entwined with both of Scully's. She thought of his sister and both of their fathers and her daughter and Melissa and Jack Willis and Pendrell and Max Fenig and Clyde Bruckman and Lucy Householder and even a part of Ed Jerse and she was so tired of crying she just sat there, feeling the weight. They waited for it to pass. It was that goddamn town. The ghost town taking a toll on them. They had more ghosts than most and it was taking a toll on them. Distantly, Scully knew Mulder would proceed the next day as if they hadn’t held hands for an hour on her bed, crying and not talking or meeting each other's eyes, and so would she. She felt a part of him was always trying to force her to leave. She felt the other half of him turned murderous at the suggestion that she cared about anyone else in the world. How long could they go on in some kind of quotidian malarial fever, knocked out in delirium most hours and then wild and febrile once a day on the clock? _Something has to change_ , she thought and half prayed. But they had both changed so much already, and it was change that had smote them so down.

In Washington, they took a week off. Her first day back in the office, Mulder greeted her with a dirty joke and a smile.


	12. Opening Wide, Like a Jungle Orchid For a Love-Struck Bee, Then Goes Liquid

Diana saw as she had always seen, saw what she had seen already and looked upon before. The steady flow of days like lights in a highway tunnel at night. She could have been a girl standing with her torso out the sunroof, time running like a tunnel chute of wind, days like those yellow passing lights, liminal and in propulsion forth. Split right through betwixt a stubborn double line. The painted hallow way - onwards down.

On cue, she returned to Washington, to Mulder, a surprise accepted ambivalently and without a gift receipt, and she saw that all of her words were spoken slow and code for, “I come in peace.” There was a doorstopper wedged between him and the scientist. They could not close in on each other, they could not make their hinges meet. Diana saw that she had slipped in through a gate pried ajar just wide enough through careful and necessary ruthlessness, which at least meant that none of their pain had gone to waste. She saw Agent Scully was smaller and withdrawn, more brutalised, more sidelined, left out in the cold. She saw the silence which Scully wielded like the tip of all rage. It said, _You don’t know_. Behind that, in fear, it asked, _Do you?_

Fathers worldwide perfected the art of requiring a glass of water from the kitchen when their wives and daughters brought up a topic more volatilely relevant to the fairer sex. In the same way, Mulder slipped in and out of rooms with manifest terror when silence stepped in to shake hands with the fractured open marriage of a man and woman and wife; or, worse yet, when Gibson, in his distantly misanthropic, wearied way, would dictate a hint of a truth deliberately phrased to unsettle without giving away. Diana saw already the powers at play. It fascinated her to find Mulder and Scully so jittery. Diana levelled herself with Gibson and he stayed silent, knowing that she knew, and that he knew – they both saw through. When he told Mulder, “And one of them is thinking about you,” Diana asked, “Which one?” knowing that by asking, she exposed Scully. Mulder, in all his chivalry, more of a prophet than she, had Gibson parrot back, “He doesn’t want me to say.” It was further insult to Scully to know Mulder knew as well. Diana saw her shrink twice smaller down.

Diana saw too, that if she and Scully respected each other less, they might pretend to like each other more. They were two types of raven; one ebony and one a phoenix flame. Black tungsten and a coal-stoked copper ring. She saw Scully’s dignity and agony; her doubt in certainty; her evident necessity and self-perceived dismissal; a cat which, when let out of the house to roam, thought it was being thrown away.

Diana saw that Mulder missed her, after all, like a man six-months clean pausing in the hall of a sweat-smoke party, entranced by a stranger bent over injecting in the black oil shadows of the host’s liquid dark room. She reminded him of her straightforwardness, her low expectations, his guiltlessness in the empty slate of her life, her lack of need, the absence of a dead child and career thrown away in good faith on his name. Diana saw the brief pull this would have on him after the living nightmare of seeing himself kicking Scully in the head while she was down and out all year, unable to stop himself. She took his hand and said, “I’m on your side,” which meant, “Remember not having to worry about me? Remember not having to care?” It would not hold him, but it would tempt him long enough – she saw, she saw – for Scully to witness it. Diana saw the freeze of a figure by the door, saw it turn and leave. Diana saw a woman think, _We were nothing. All that because he didn’t have his wife with him instead._ Diana saw a woman realize, _If he wanted it from me, he would have taken it already._

Slipping his hand away, Mulder drew it to his coat pocket and pulled out divorce papers with a decently apologetic look. Diana caught Gibson glance back at them through the one-way mirror glass. She saw him shake his head, judgmentally. A divorce penned down in a children’s psychiatric hospital felt like a fitting end. The ink was not dry before Diana began to miss her ex-husband, as she had seen she would. She placed a hand on his shoulder and raised her lips to his cheek. He stood eerily wooden, more handsome than ever these days, more stone. A boy and a man, he lowered his eyes and let her walk away. Thus was the mundanity of severing holy vows. The comedy was in Scully calling him immediately after and lying about her whereabouts, presumably out of shame or new heartache. They were blind seekers, the two of them. Diana pitied the terror in which they beheld and thrust away each other’s faith.

Later, a motel room, a handover, two women playing Cold War Joe. Diana saw that Scully had been thinking about her, discussing her with the telegraph pole of a boy; she saw the guarded neutrality and test-worn fatigue in Gibson’s little, bog-toad eyes. He was the oracle myth hyrbidised with a wise old owl in a kid’s skin suit. Diana saw Scully’s growing, self-reprimanding shame, her self-belittlement. She saw it flee the scene. Alone, she saw Gibson eye her in the absence Scully’s warm sentry – he knew. Beyond a doubt. She wondered why he did not say what he knew. Perhaps he was bankrupt in empathy, exhausted by the incongruence of adult action and thought to the point of total emotional withdrawal. A child Switzerland. Little boy Pandora, aware and totally helpless.

What she did not see was the way in which his apathy to adult sacrifice would be so calmly turned on her. She had not anticipated that the end would come so soon. She had bargained for a little more time. They had discussed this, her and the phantom man. The Lord worked in mysterious ways; so too did the most pathetic of his creations. Of course, all along, Diana had known that the car shooting through the tunnel of her life was that final silver bullet meant only for her. But not this bullet, not this day, not this fusty motel. Not the ending she saw coming down the barrel through the grotty window pane, aimed at her along with the glowing tip of a Morley butt.

She was right, as a month winding through hospital wards would tell. When Diana came to eventually, searing breaths through a punctured furnace lung, she thought, _I was right. Ordinary clairvoyance. Another thing Mulder once gave to me._

-

There were two powers at play; absolute love and the absolute absence of it. Caught in limbo between the polar pair, it was only a matter of time before Diana turned and found herself mowed down by the crossfire. She had seen that. But, beyond the trajectory of her own voluntarily barren life, she had been blind, and would die one day blind to her own blindness, the real tragedy being how little she really understood of the love she had tossed so nobly away. 

-

The X-Files burned down. The fire made an effigy of Mulder; a man’s life in boxed-up flame. The fire choked itself out down in the anaerobic niche of their basement. Every man and woman at the FBI, when they heard, looked down at their standard-issue black shoes after receiving the news. A laughing stock was not funny when cremated and poured into an urn. A few women in the pathology sector agreed, “That’ll kill him. The both of them.” A whisper of jealousy turned to gaze-averted sympathy.

The next was a blur: Scully, her hair a candle flame, hooked onto his right hip through one of his belt loops, cracking jokes to keep his chin up through the worse and worst of blows; a jammed Coke dispenser, a sitting bomb; Scully competing with him to see who could string themselves up on the cross most passionately to take the fall for both of their professional sins; eighty-sixed and puttering through the scrap-strewn alley alternative to an emergency urinal; Scully, Scully taken away - from him - taken away from him – piss, brick splashback, and staggering backwards; Kurtzweil, hawkish and gangly and stringing him along; _Scully, take me to Scully, she won’t let me go alone_ ; idling by the door, ear pricked boozily to the sashay sound of her silk pyjamas slipping to the floor as she changed into something else at his behest; furtive oedematous cadaver hauls, escaping military claws; Scully explaining it to him, witnessing, his better eye; Scully getting on that plane; Scully prepared to risk it all, again, again, and again, on no more than an unearned faith; the lilac dusk of the highway, dirt thrown up in their wake; the indigo night and a verdant corn maze sea; the Art Deco lunar glow of desert apiaries; the consequences falling on her head; Scully at his door, begging for something to make her stay, pleading with him to let her walk away; Scully in his arms, Scully in his hands, all of her fitting there, between the small space in his palms, so he could crush her if he pleased, wild with the frenzy of needing her so much, the pain in her tired eyes from being told that she was loved, the desperate little sounds she made in pressing into him, the warm parting of her lips in open and breathy wait; the love-struck bee; Scully dictating her own lancinating shock; a bullet, going black; waking up to find himself febrile and on a plane to Antarctica, aware distantly of blood leaking out through his temporal bone; a city-sized incubator underground, a metallic network as deep and large as the neon and black sewerage system of New York in science-fiction blockbusters; a needle in a haystack, a golden cross; Scully naked and limp, into the trembling hammock of his arms; taking turns about to die; the sinkhole of falsity, the flying reveal of Truth; then nothing – only the vast, unending ice.


	13. Ice

**One**  
Outwards, there went a white nothing. Overhead, an albatross cry. The mountains in the distance along with all else; the pale sky, the blinding ice, more ice - in the distance. Beneath the bright blankness, two bodies atop the frozen, wet ground. The wind, like a lashing light. There was an isolation more absolute than aloneness.

Scully came to – possibly for the second or third time. She couldn’t remember having fallen unconscious again. The polar air conspired with her recently intubated, raw-rubbed trachea to give each breath the red singe of hell, but she sucked the air down, making a conscious effort to live. Her gas exchange chemoreceptors were on shut-down. Every fine-tuned, autonomic response in her body was on shut-down. She had been all but comatose until very recently, as far as she could recall. Her eyes burned, her skin burned, her tongue, her stomach, all burning up on the ice, and she realised she was running a fever. Ironically, it might have been the only thing keeping her alive. 

Through the white-wash of delirium, she became aware once more of Mulder like a cement-block wrapped in her arms. She was shivering, he was dead still. His lips had purpled. There were snowflakes on his lashes and he looked peaceful. 

Scully slapped him.

“Mulder!” she croaked, after a few unsuccessful attempts at grinding her vocal cords together. She slapped him again without much leverage, making the assault tepid. Sleep was the hypothermic’s swan song. “No sleeping, Mulder. Dammit, wake up!”

She was rewarded with mumbled incoherency. At least he was alive. That was settled. There was no way her fingers were warm enough to be of much use palpating a peripheral pulse. 

They must have sloshed through the ice at some point because their clothes were covered in sleet and their hair was soaked through, quickly snap-freezing into icicle fangs over their brows. Scully’s medical doctor mind waded through the mist of fever to afford a life-saving panic. Wet clothes, unconsciousness, and the punishing wind; the trifecta of lethal hypothermia. She forced blades of cold air down her airway and willed herself to think fast before she fell unconscious again.

“Mulder, where are we?” Nothing. The wind howled. “I need you to answer me!” She shook him as best as she could but he weighed more than even any healthy, non-semi-conscious woman her size could manage. “How did you get here? Does anybody know where we are?”

He mumbled after a moment then trailed off, going somehow more limp than before. 

“Mulder!” she called, larynx shearing. The heel of panic pressed itself to her throat. She was so tired. She was exhausted and lost and her body weighed a whole tonne. If she had any strength or fluid, she might have worried about crying. As it was, she could barely muster a dry sob.

Anger, her back-up generator, kicked in at last and it bolstered her up desperately. From within the swallowing, fur-lined abyss of the expedition parka she’d been bundled in, she grunted and managed a rigid scope of their surroundings. In one direction, a back-drop of misted, grey mountains, like the rim of a basin so wide she could only see the border of one edge. In the other, dunes of white ice, onwards forever. Coming into focus, just before them, a sinkhole so large she had mistaken it for a crevasse, and too circular to be any kind of geographic anomaly that came to her swimming mind. The wind threw knives at her eyes. She sunk back down, at a loss.

She had the presence of mind to check Mulder’s fortunately overcomplicated watch. It was September 15, 1998. Thank God. She’d only lost a week this time. From the fact that his watch read one in the afternoon and that there was blasting sunlight, she surmised they must be South Pole. Antarctica. She might have laughed if there was time, but already, as they had been lying there, the sun had carved a pie-sized angle of movement out of the sky. They had to move quickly.

Overhead, there was another albatross cry. Scully looked up instinctively. She located the sound skywards and followed the bird’s distant arc through the air. It headed away from the mountains, over a snow dune rising behind them and out of sight. She looked harder in that direction, drew a visual perpendicular from its trajectory down to the ground. Many yards over from the multitude of vehicle tracks heading away in obvious abandonment of herself and Mulder, she registered, for the first time, faint footprints pressed in the ice. Mulder sized holes. Hope seized her up like a noose.

Scully made a choked prayer and wriggled herself free from the human-sized paper-weight of Mulder dumped on her paper thin bones. It took a mammoth effort to pry herself up from the ground and immediately she went black and woke again to find herself slumped back beside Mulder, supine. She tried once more, slower, allowing time for orthostatic adjustments. Her vision took up a television fuzz, but she managed to stay on her feet, bones burning. Her head was replaced with a fish tank of water swilling around. Another razor-sharp breath and she took a few tin-man steps around to Mulder’s feet. A tiny remnant of capability for forethought bade her swap her soaked through thermal socks for his boots and then, drawing on Herculean reserve, she reached down to grab his ankles. How could one man’s legs weigh so much? She had a tree trunk of a lower limb in each hand. Meanwhile, his head, pale and frosty, lolled about on the ice unguarded. There was no time to struggle.

Dry-swallowing, Scully made the first tug, swiveling Mulder around. She allowed her negligible body weight to help drag him backwards, away from the sinkhole and the distant grey mountain rim, heading in the direction of his recent footprints, the albatross arc. Dragging him up over the dune would be impossible in her state. Already, carting him over flat ground, each boot-heavy step threatened to send her into aortic dissection. Her pain was sublime. She would have to take the slightly longer path around the dune, keeping to level ground. If there was nothing on the other side, if her hunch was incorrect, they would die. But at least they would die trying.

The pull seemed endless. One thousand steps were just five. The dune receded as she neared it. Distance and approach in equilibrium, and a dizziness so steep the world almost spun too fast to appear like it was moving at all. Scully paused and dropped to all fours after God knows how long in order to wretch up something chartreuse. It globbed onto the ice, a plug of neon lime mucus. She groaned and drew her sleeve messily over her mouth, dragging herself back upright. Then she was back at the long haul again, Mulder like a boulder of flesh, her movements staccato. 

For a while, she was pulling half-unconscious with her eyes closed, unaware of moving her limbs. She had to open her eyes to see if she was in fact moving. The pain was so immense it cancelled itself out. She felt the edges of her vision turn as white as the rest of the world. In her ears, the wet crunch of snow beneath her feet, Mulder’s sleigh body sliding over the frozen bright land, the barreling lash of the wind. 

She opened her eyes again. Progress came, illogically, as a shock. Somehow she had gotten around the other side of the snow dune. Perhaps they had died. Perhaps this was hell, a white blank. No. Life gave her pain, and the pain made her sure of somehow being alive. 

Then – there! – materialising out of a dissipated snow cloud, a vibrant orange Sno-Cat. Scully nearly buckled in all her relief. They were so close to shelter. 

On and onwards she dragged, gradually losing her sight. Eyes opened or closed, the blackness encroached in a glaucomic tunnel. She kept on. Her pulse sputtered hazardously. She kept on. In the cold, her windpipe had shrunken twice over to the diameter of a straw, and each breath was a sluggish, wrenched out wheeze-cry. She kept on. She willed herself to extremes.

She and Mulder shared one lifeline. One could get tossed around and perch on the ledge of sure death as long the other one stayed alive; their lives acted as a mutual back-up charger. So she knew Mulder was alive, even as she heaved him ungracefully over the ice, his head bumping along and his arms lagging outstretched behind. As long as she could make it ten more steps with a pulse. Nine. Eight. Seven. She cried out. Six. Five. Four. Another cry. Three. Two. She fell down. 

A mouthful of ice was the only prize awaiting her at the finish line. That, and the rubber smell of Sno-Cat tires right next to her head. Blessed be the Lord of all things. Their tank-like savior was not a fever mirage.

Scully gave herself a minute to recover and spent most of that minute hacking up lumps of green slime. What had started as a coarse shiver was now edging towards febrile convulsions. She could hardly coordinate her limbs enough to crawl over to Mulder and press her ear to his mouth. A few shallow breaths. They were alive.

Scully scooped a handful of ice into her mouth, swished it around to clean out the mucus, then took another mouthful and lowered her lips to Mulder’s once the ice had melted, making him drink some water. She repeated the process twice before Mulder coughed up her deposit and experienced a miraculous moment of consciousness. Scully tried calculating where he stood on the Glasgow Coma Scale but her own GCS was too low for logical reasoning. She heard a rough, breathy voice – her own – pleading with Mulder to move, to climb into the Sno-Cat cabin with her. He slipped away again, eyes rolling back in his head. She revived him once more with mouth-to-mouth fluid resuscitation, knowing it was not a method recognised in any text-book but the insane workings of her fever-bled mind. Mulder groaned – or perhaps it was she that groaned – and she became aware of their bodies moving together, unsure how or whose limbs were where, but they moved. They clambered. As they had done to haul themselves up metal ladders so cold they had given her palms freeze-burn, a foggy memory of emerging from a city-sized manhole out of the ice. They were systole and diastole in alternate. He fell unconscious so she could come to, then he came to so she could fall unconscious, and so on. And up they went into the Sno-Cat cabin and someone let out an animal cry as they slumped themselves finally in and one of their hands reached to slam the door closed. 

Silence. The muffled wind beyond that.

They were soaked through. They lay on the narrow floor space before the front row of seats, their heads beside the accelerator and brake pedals. Scully was drenched with sweat and snow-melt, Mulder with the freeze of near-death. He was out cold, literally. She went into autopilot, unzipping his vest and her own parka with the last of her trembling fine motor skills, then used her final ounce of strength to squeeze her naked upper half underneath Mulder’s oversized thermal. Her head emerged from the collar beside his, and their bare torsos were pressed together. Collapsing finally, she donated fever heat.

The parka settled over and around them like a sleeping bag. In the distance, an albatross made a circling cry. They were alone and alive and the ice was endless for miles.

**Two**  
Mulder awoke to pitch blackness and Scully Baby Björn-ed to his torso. His brain thawed a little faster than his body and he managed to process several facts: Scully was alive, he was alive, they were in Antarctica, somehow back in the Sno-Cat, his muscles were about as rigid and sore as a freshly caned ass, the wind outside was the white-noise of imminent death, and Scully was very much naked up top.

Moving was a slow process. It took him a few minutes to connect the strings of his conscious mind to his puppet limbs, and eventually he managed to lift one arm and then the other. He imagined Scully lecturing him about muscle contractions aiding circulation so he opened and closed his fists a few times. His feet were numb, his socks a puddle of ice-water, but he willed some blood back down to his extremities with some very concentrated foot wiggling. The sting was like pins and needles graduating to swords and skewers, but two supremely painful feet were better than none.

Having returned to his earthly form, he began the considerable process of extracting himself from his partner. Her skin and hair were damp with what smelt like sweat, and she shuddered atop him occasionally. She had drooled a little on his chest. He managed to slide his arms and body out of the thermal and slip out from underneath her, leaving her covered and on her back beside him. Then, with a grunt, he lifted her carefully off the floor to lie across the front seats of the Sno-Cat.

The vehicle and (naked) Scully had done a good job of raising his core temperature above zero but it was still freezing inside and his teeth began to chatter as he fumbled in the dark for the sleeping bag he had stuffed under the driver’s seat. Some blind maneouverings later, Scully was in his thermal and vest, snug as a bug in the sleeping bag, and he was in a spare thermal he’d had the godsent foresight to pack, rugged up in the expedition parka. He’d given both of them fresh socks, the only pairs left. 

Mulder felt around in the pack he had stashed under the seats and landed upon a flashlight. The windows were fogged over, so he couldn’t see outside. He knew already there was nothing but a stretch of white blackness.

What would medical doctor Scully do? He used the flashlight to examine her. Under the white light, her skin was ghostly and sunburned across her nose and cheeks. Her hair was stuck to her face and he used his fingers, frozen as they were, to clear it off. There was green residue around her lips which were pale and cracked and flaking. There was a bitter taste in his own mouth and he had a vague memory of Scully giving him the mama-penguin treatment.

Water. There was a flask of emergency water in the stashed day pack. He hugged it to his chest under his shirt, wincing as it defrosted sufficiently. Then he used the water to wipe her face and mouth gently and raised her head in the hopes that she would drink. There were a few chokes, but the water went down and her lids fluttered beneath the light of the torch stuck between his teeth.

He took a generous swig of water himself, gulped it down, suddenly housing the Sahara desert in the back of his throat. There was no need to be stingy. They were in the middle of one of the largest reserves of fresh water on the planet.

The torch was balanced on the dashboard, a little battery-charged moon. Mulder knelt beside the front seats. Scully murmured his name, skipping a consonant or two. He bent and kissed her cheek and it came away salty and cool. If, as it seemed, she’d had a fever, it was now broken.

She blinked groggily and found his face in the dimness.

“Hey there,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over the wind. 

“Mul’er, we’re in Antarctica,” she informed him seriously. He laughed and turned the laugh into another cheek kiss, trying not to embarrass her. The jury was out. He loved her completely.

“Yeah, we are,” he said, staying close so she didn’t have to speak loudly. Her voice was more coarse than it had been even in those last days before her remission. “How’d we get in the Sno-Cat?”

“How’d we get in the Sno-Cat? Mulder, how did we get in fucking Antarctica?”

He laughed again, beside himself with the joy of being chastised. Their breaths were warm against each other’s faces, the only warmth as far as the horizon in all directions.

“Mulder?” she prompted him.

“Flights to Jamaica were all booked out.” She closed her eyes, huffing the world’s most begrudging laugh. “You think you can sit up and eat something?”

Some re-shuffling ensued, then they were both sitting on the row of seats, alternating swallows of chilled water and two of the protein bars from the day pack. Mulder had tucked himself into the second sleeping bag and Scully was wearing the appropriately sized parka he had brought for her, and they both sat close together for additional heat – though really, no body heat was making it through the layers of clothing they had on. Proximity was comfort, and comfort was as much a part of survival as a tasteless, high-fat protein bar.

He gave her the short version: the Sno-Cat was ‘borrowed’ from Casey Station, an Australian Antarctic research outpost. He’d followed the Well-Curated Man’s coordinates using his compass for a day and night straight, heading inland from the East Coast, further into Wilkes Land. There was a map in the day pack, which he had also ‘borrowed,’ and which they could look at once the sun rose. He had no radio, and no way of knowing if Skinner knew where they were. Skinner had organised for him to be with an expert and keep to in contact, but that plan had quickly gone awry.

“I mighta been a little out of my mind because the details are like a Monet painting – and I mean, late-stage cataract Monet. I remember showing up at the station, flashing my badge. Skinner had rung ahead and explained. They were prepared to go with me, but they needed time to ready a guide, the whole shebang, saying we couldn’t leave right away, and I was medically unfit, and they would send someone else instead and, most of all, they knew for certain there was nothing out there on the ice but more ice. No secret lair, no Special Agent Dana Scully, no government conspiracy. So I, uh, I hopped in the Sno-Cat with as many supplies as I could carry, and I drove until the gas croaked and you know the rest.”

“How’d you even get down here?” she asked, working her way slowly through the protein bar. It seemed to take her some effort to swallow. She was like a mouse taking on a cheese wheel. 

“Not without some finagling on the part of The Lone Gunmen.”

“Illegally, in other words.”

“They don’t even usually let flights in or out of the continent from February through November. All I know is Skinner must have made a hell of a ruckus or shoveled out some serious Bureau cash to get me parceled down here. And the Gunmen supplied any navigational information or fake documentation they could conjure. I got through, I got to you. I can’t remember most of it.”

There was a pause as she took in their situation. The wind made a bone-chilling sound. Mulder’s own mind remained empty, having deferred the power of all reasoning to Scully. She was assessing his profile in the low light, thinking, coming back to herself.

“Mulder,” she said eventually, “did you get shot in the head?”

He was reminded suddenly that his cranium was throbbing magnificently and he wanted Scully to look after him.

“A little bit.”

On cue, she reached for the flashlight and began peppering him with frowning questions about his field of vision, muttering something about pupil reactions being equal and concurrent, making him follow her efficient little finger, telling him, “No, Mulder, just with your eyes, not your whole head,” and touching his face all over.

“You’re okay,” she said, and ran her hand from his cheek down to his shoulder, satisfied. 

The sun began peeking over the mountainless horizon behind them, and the sky went from indigo to a dusty pale blue and lilac. Mulder reached forward and wiped the fog temporarily from the dash. For a moment, they sat in silence and allowed the enormity of barren sublimity to encase them. The world beyond their vehicle was simple and silent, peacefully uninhabitable, larger than they could dream in all its snowy expanse. The wind died off, and the air settled into a polar dawn.

“I have something for you,” Mulder said quietly. He motioned for Scully to unzip her parka and reached into the pocket of the vest she was wearing to draw out her cross necklace. Bowing her head silently, she allowed him to put it on her, saying nothing of the essential way he brushed the his knuckles along her neck and throat as he withdrew his hands and helped her zip back up.

She watched him, her eyes the same open pool of soft blue as the dawn.

“I saw it, Scully,” he said with wonder, moved by her life, her beauty. “I saw the ship. You saw too.”

She said nothing, and then, more serious than he could handle in his ice-brittle state: “I believe you.” He nodded, relieved, bewildered. He was revitalised.

“How did we get back in here?” he asked again. 

“I dragged you from the ice.”

“You did well. We would have died in the night. The days are getting longer down here, but they’re still short. You saved our lives.”

“Yeah, after what?” she said under her breath with a surprising amount of bitterness which, thankfully, did not appear to be directed at him. He left the comment alone.

Then, Mulder took Scully’s hands and blew warm air over them. She watched him. They would not be going anywhere that day. They were both too weak, but two people only breathed warmth so attentively into each other’s clasped hands if they intended on making it home.

“We need a plan,” she said, and they got down to staying alive.

**Three**  
Scully took stock of their lives, lying awake in the dark. The X-Files had burned down. She was taken to Antarctica and, supposedly, turned into a body-sized uterus for flesh-eating extraterrestrial biological entity babies, Mulder had gotten shot in the head and come after her. Now they were stranded on the ice, with a very, very Great Depression week’s ration of KaBoom! chocolate protein bars, and some other essential supplies. These included: a map, a compass, a two-person tent, a torch, batteries, a large shovel, a first aid kit, a lighter, a small gas stove, a tin cooking pot, a swiss army knife, two sleeping bags, all the clothes on their bodies (including fortuitously well-fitting boots pilfered for Scully), sun-block, and medical salve, some of which she had already slathered all over her parchment dry face. All this stuffed into a backpack two-thirds the size of her body or otherwise slung over every spare limb Mulder could manage as he’d cut loose from Casey Station. Even with his big brain leaking out of his bigger head, he’d managed to be unintentionally brilliant. He had, however, forgotten to bring her a bra and underwear. ‘Forgotten,’ more like. 

Reaching down to grab Mulder’s slack arm and read his watch, she registered that it was six A.M. She went over the plan again. Another hour and a bit until dawn. The temperature was just below freezing, which was relatively warm. Without the polar winds picking up again, they’d be moving in ideal conditions. The wind was what would kill them. It would dry them out and freeze them solid, preserved perfectly like a couple of mummies buried in the anti-desert. 

Scully watched her partner lying beneath her. The light of the milky way and full moon were powerful enough tools out there in the cityless empty that she could see the sheen of his bristly cheek. 

It was as difficult to believe that he’d come to Antarctica for her as it was easy to believe. More believable still was that he’d come with no escape plan. Antarctica, Scully, boom bam thank you ma’am. Mulder could drop himself in the middle of the Amazon and find El Derado. Getting them back home was her job. It gave her something, at least. If she thought too long about what had landed them in Antarctica in the first place, about the indignity of having to be saved at all, she began to feel dizzy with rage.

Instead, she watched Mulder sleeping just below her. He was a good man. He was many things, he was insane, clinically mentally incalculably insane, but his goodness lay at the core of all things and it was what she circled back to always. Watching him there, his hair fanning out airily in the abyss of indigo timelessness, something was changing in her.

Something was changing all around. In a sudden rising glow, the little light cast into the cabin flared luminous teal. Scully jumped up, a moment of lunacy convincing her the mothership had returned. 

Beyond the dash, there was only the reflection of God.

The sky swam with colour and dazzling light. Heaven licked at the dark. The mountains were the teeth of angels. A benign serpent of liquid neon pulsed in slow streams below a backdrop of stars.

Scully woke Mulder to see, grabbed his hand and pulled him up to the seats, holding onto him as they watch the spirit world humble them down. Every real thing seemed ghostly and pale. Only this, a magnificent blush, a universe thrumming with life, was alive. Neither of them were on Earth.

“Aurora Australis,” she revered. His hand moved beneath hers, but even their great friendship was nothing compared to godliness so bright. They were shivering from more than the cold. “I wish this were the only strange light. This is all I want to see when I look up at the sky.”

She felt Mulder digesting her implication, but he kept rebuttal to himself.

“We should go,” she said as the light began to fade into another heatless sunrise.

*

Nine hours closer to the east coast of the southernmost continent, Mulder and Scully pitched camp for the night. At Scully’s suggestion, they picked a spot at the base of an iced-over hill, sheltering themselves from an easterly wind which appeared to be picking up bravado.

As they wrangled silently with the tent, Scully was grateful for her childhood obsession with Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, the race to the South Pole, and her father’s indulgence and knowledge reserve, an obsessive pioneer himself. She remembered her mother’s concern at her voracious appetite for survival guide books from local libraries. Once, the Scully matriarch had discovered Dana was keeping an emergency survival pack under her bed and threw it in the bin immediately. She sat her strangest daughter down later the same day and explained that, if she was interested in survival, in the preservation of life, she should focus on making that a productive, communal interest, such as through the field of medicine. Scully graduated her way into the medical world and promptly took the elevator all the way down to the morgue and then the underground speed train to the world of firearms and violent criminals. Suffice it to say Margaret Scully threw the towel in.

Whether the result of a preoccupation with the preservation of life or with survival or with the tactical avoidance and out-maneouverance of certain death, Scully was an Antarctic encylopaedia waiting to be pored over. She fancied herself a Shackleton’s natural successor, pitching camp by that hill. She thought of her father as she was using the base of the tin pot Mulder had stolen to hammer the tent pegs into the rock-hard ice. She thought of what Melissa would have said if Scully had told her all about this adventure out in the bitter cold nowhere of Earth, if Melissa had been alive and back home. She would have made some grand remark, likening Scully and Mulder to astronauts, to twin flames on the ice, to white birds circling each other in the over-bright Antarctic sky.

Scully’s albatross made a reappearance just as she was bending to duck into the tent with Mulder. The bird had followed them nine hours across the burning white plain. They’d only made five miles, weak as they were and conserving energy to stretch food supplies, but they were half-way to a spot upon which Mulder’s map promised there existed a small abandoned research outpost: Mariner’s Hut. They had to last one more night on the ice.

She cracked knee crepitus as she crouched to join Mulder inside. Already the sun was setting again beyond the tent walls and the sky was a parade of fire. Mulder zipped them in tight and they both chattered and shook and panted, shedding their shoes and stripping down to their thermals, climbing into the goose-down bliss of their two sleeping bags.

Mulder braved an arm outside of his sleeping bag to grab himself and Scully their seventh high-calorie protein bar of the day, throwing one to her across the arm's length space of tent floor between them. They lay on their sides and silently chewed away, breathing heavily. Mulder’s five o’clock shadow had gone through puberty and Scully had the urge to reach out and scratch his chin, but it was too cold and her body was too sore from the hike and being abducted et cetera. 

“What compelled you to stuff almost fifty of these molding-clay adjacent bars into your day-pack?” she asked through a mouthful. Her masticators ached. 

“I don’t know but when we get back to civilsation, I’m heading to the nearest toilet and sticking two fingers down my throat until I’ve purged every last one of these dog food sticks.”

He had the endearing habit of hunching his shoulders and rocking back and forth lightly when he was cold. She found herself mimicking him.

“When we get back to civilsation,” she echoed. “You ever thought you’d say those words?”

“You said that exact phrase to me when were out on that, uh, werecoyote-slash-plain-old-rabid-dog-infestation case out in Alabama.”

“Fuckin’ Alabama,” she remembered with a visceral shudder.

Mulder half-shivered half-laughed. He had finished his bar and was eyeing hers intently. They were both starving and drained, and Scully couldn’t remember what it felt like to have warm bone marrow, but Mulder was grinning nonetheless, delighted by nothing.

“You’re in a good mood for someone stuck in the middle of Antarctica,” she noted, finishing off her own bar with a difficult swallow. 

“I can’t believe you’re alive.”

“We’re alive.” He had trouble with plural pronouns. He nodded, quite happily. 

They took turns drinking from the flask and the water was so cold she could feel it entering her stomach. The light was fading quickly. His skin was soft blue. Then she couldn’t see him at all. His breathing was the only thing alerting her to the presence of another human being within the horizon. Maybe they always felt this alone. She shivered unceasingly. 

“You cold?” his voice reached out through the darkness. 

“Yeah.”

“You- you wanna come on over?” The wind whipped the tent walls. He understood her silence. “Scout’s honour, no funny business. I’m freezing my ass off as well. You’re the doctor, you tell me what makes sense. Upholding some flimsy sense of propriety in a desert miles away from any semblance of human society? Or two people surviving in a logical, innocent way?”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she tried, but it came out through teeth gritted against the unshakeable cold. She would bite her tongue off in the night if she wasn’t careful.

Against all good sense, experiencing a flash-back to a hallway and his hand pulling her lips towards his, Scully sucked in a breath and crawled two steps to Mulder’s side. To his credit, he made no comment. Just shuffled over a bit to make room.

Immediately, his warmth swallowed her. She took a few deep shaky breaths of exothermic Mulder-spice smell. Since he seemed to have no intention of repositioning so they were sleeping back-to-back, she decided that sleeping facing each other was the next safest thing. She nestled into him, shamelessly soaking up his body heat.

“Fuck, Scully! Are those your hands or ten ice poles?” he winced. He pulled her hands deftly to be wedged under each of his underarms, warming them through. 

“I’m more at risk of hypothermia because of my increased surface area to body mass ratio; I lose heat more rapidly,” she recited. She felt him nod placatingly, and he began rubbing his hand up and down her back to warm her. 

“You saw it, Scully.” His breath was blessedly hot against the top of her head. “You saw the ship.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Maybe? Scully, you saw it. I heard you say so.”

“That whole day is a blur for me. The whole week.” She shivered against him. His grip on her back tightened unthinkingly. “But I believe you. I’m so tired.”

“In the interest of full disclosure, I saw you naked,” he whispered. Scully revisited the physiological diversion of blood supply underlying the sensation of stomach flutters.

“Mulder, that was just your life flashing before your eyes.”

“Would that that were true.”

“No funny business,” she reminded him. She nudged his thigh with her knee.

“That wasn’t funny business, it was an offer of tit for tat. Tat being the space ship. And tit being -”

“Mulder,” she reprimanded, but her hands were slotted under his sides and her face was buried into his chest, so the decorum act came off as even more perfunctory than usual.

“Okay, rest. And try and think back. Dream of it if you have to. Tell me you saw it, Scully. I need you to say that you did.”

He didn’t know what he needed. Scully knew. She knew what he thought he needed, and the ways in which it would disappoint him if realised as the truth. She kept him honest. Her goddamn strict rationalism…Nevertheless, she nodded against him, gave one last shudder, settling in. Without breathing, her leg made the dangerous journey of slotting in between his. She needed this to survive.

The gloved hand of sleep covered them. They lived through the night as a pair, entwined, essential, instinctive. To the omniscient eye from afar, their tent was a speck of blood on the snow.

**Four**  
In the morning Scully doctored him, caking them both in enough sunblock to turn osteoporotic bones into vitamin-D deficient powdered sugar. She forced him to down two flasks of water. The stove did a fair job of speed melting the ice, but they were conserving gas, so every gulp was still cold enough to feel like deep-throating the abominable snowman. Then they dressed and packed and were on their way just as the sun set a crystal blush over the sky.

Mulder alternated between making Scully walk ahead of him (to ensure she didn’t disappear from behind his back) and walking behind him (after she’d warned him about falling into hidden cracks in the ice). Every innocent stumble sent him into skeletal arrest, and anxiety became a greater physical drain than the droning pace they kept up over the day.

They walked without any sense of moving and it gave him land-sickness supreme. All directions, open wide into nothing. One disembodied step after another. The ice grew vaster. 

Even with the pack on, he was faster than her. He made leaps and bounds with a casual stride compared. They didn’t talk. Walking consumed every metabolic and psychological out-put. The wind was against them, and Scully upped their obligatory water consumption accordingly.

She insisted too on carrying the tent and being in charge of navigation and he was happy to oblige until around noon when she paused abruptly before him. He rear-ended her, sending her toppling forward limply onto all fours, coughing with a sudden force. 

The coughs came without reprieve, one wave after another, a surfer under the swell. Mulder was down beside her, shouting her name over the wind with the helplessness of a child seeing their depressed mother get in the car and drive off with a faraway look. There was a terrible moment where she appeared to stop breathing entirely, her body rigid and small, then she coughed loose a heterogenous stream of jade-coloured refuse. It looked like something out of the Kid’s Choice Awards.

“You okay? Scully?”

She was heaving, pushing back to a kneeling position and spitting onto the snow. Mulder fumbled for a handful of ice and raised it to her mouth. She took in as much as she could and then pushed his hand away, turning to spit again. He hadn’t been able to tell from behind, but Scully was sporting a translucent, icy complexion and her hair was auburn, wet through.

“I think I’m getting sick again,” she said faintly, grimacing. Their hoods were drawn low enough over their brows to shield direct sunlight, but the reflection off the ice was almost as painfully bright.

“Another fever? How?”

“Some parasitic fevers transmitted by insect vectors are paroxysmal – cyclic – in nature. Like malaria. Plasmodium malariae infection manifests as a quartan fever, once every three days,” she told him between unsteady breaths. “Mulder, help me stand.”

He hoisted her up and took the tent off her, keeping one arm around her back. They stuttered forwards at her behest.

“You think the alien virus being transmitted by bees could have the same cycle? I- I vaccinated you.”

“Vaccination is prevention, Mulder.”

“Then I cured you,” he said insistently. They were moving again. There was no time to stop. The ice pulled them eastward like mayflies with two days to live and an end-goal in sight. It was too bright to see straight.

“Maybe this is my body having an immune reaction to viral remnants in my system.” She coughed once more to the side, not slowing down.

“We found the bee,” he told her, remembering. She halted and looked up with eyes like cold fire. “The bee that stung you. The Gunmen have it.”

“Mulder, yes! That’s exactly what we need! Tangible, irrefutable proof! Do you know what this means? With that bee, I ostensibly have all the evidence I need to support years of our work on the X-Files, to corroborate what you saw on the ice.”

“What we saw,” he said stubbornly. She ignored him and urged them onwards, her steps regaining momentum without easing any of the weight she was putting on him.

“We need to get home..."

She trailed off.

“What would you have done without the bee?” he asked.

“I would have looked for more evidence. I need it, Mulder. After everything, after this.”

Mulder tried taking more of her weight so they could move along faster. The sun had reached its zenith and begun its downward swing. With the wind picking up, the sooner they arrived at Mariner’s Hut, the better.

“So you’re saying, without it, you wouldn’t have seconded my sighting of the ship in front of our superiors in Washington.”

“I would have supported you to the best of my ability, said all I know to be true without doubt.”

“But you said you believed.”

“And I do. Mulder, please. My head aches.”

He clamped down on his molars and turned his face away, pushing back an old bite. Before he could bark, Scully’s knees gave out and she fell into him before propping herself up again. Petty grievances were forgotten, and all grievances were petty on the shining white slate of the snow.

“Mulder, do you hear that?” Scully asked raggedly. She was squinting upwards. “The albatross…”

Mulder scanned the sky. It sung with blue emptiness.

**Five**  
Consciousness was a radio tuning meanderingly in and out of stations, but there was only one station with a signal coming in and the rest was orbit junk noise. Scully felt the channels sift and shift through the static of sleep, ebbing outwards into blurred wakefulness. The world took on sluggish shape.

“Evening, Nurse Nightingale,” Mulder said from close by. 

Scully realised she had been watching him for some time, using him as a focal point around which to mould the rest of the room. That they were in a ‘room’ at all was her first clue to another bout of missing time. The room appeared to be the whole building, a small greyish cement-walled hut. There was a kitchen in the corner, a musty bookshelf, two twin beds, upon one of which she was bundled in a sleeping bag, a small dinner table and a study table, and scattered supplies all around. Mulder was sitting atop his own sleeping bag on the floor beside her. The other twin bed lay empty across the room.

“Have I got bats in the cave or something? You’re eyeing me like chicken dinner.”

Scully blinked away the remnants of sleep, rubbing her eyes.

“Mulder, I have a genuine concern that, unintentionally, your last words will be spoken in jest.” She groaned and pulled herself to a sitting position. Mulder was burning a gas lamp, suffusing the hut with warm light. He must have found extra supplies. “Is this Mariner’s Hut?”

“It’s not The Four Seasons,” he shrugged. He was fiddling with what looked like an old ham radio. It was still cold, but Scully was comfortable with her upper half sticking out of the sleeping bag in only a thermal. She noticed a gas-heater in the corner. “But it’s only marginally better than a seat at the Ice Capades. I hate the fucking Ice Capades, you know that?”

“Did you have to carry me?” she asked. He glanced up at her, then back down at his circuit board contraption, hair swinging in clumped locks over his bull-headed brow.

“The soul of Gertrude Stein descended from the heavens to possess you and forbade it, so no. But you went Scarecrow on me just as we arrived. I had to give you a the newlywed treatment over the threshold. Lucky for you, there has been no power vested in me by the state of Wilkes Land, so you’re still a free woman and I’m still a fresh divorcee.”

Outside, the world was black.

“How long was I out today?”

“Yesterday, you mean. You fever-dreamed yourself through the night and the whole of today. The sun set an hour ago. It’s seven o’clock.”

Scully felt a fresh wave of psychosomatic pre-syncope. She raised her hand to cover her eyes.

“I need paracetamol. There’s some in the first-aid kit.”

“You made me give you some already. Slurred something about mild anti-pyretics. At first I thought you were hallucinating pyrotechnics and I thought, hey, good for her, it’s the Fourth of July somewhere. You were really out of it for a while, you know, blabbering on about possessed dolls, an albatross. But then you started mumbling about a ‘ship in the ice’ and I didn’t know. I kept thinking, just wait until Scully gets here, she’ll help you.” He shrugged again self-deprecatingly and returned to his tinkering.

“The albatross wasn’t delirium,” she told him, and she stood slowly to make her way to the kitchen sink, pausing to allow the flashers in her vision to float off. “There’s been a bird following us.”

“Huh. I haven’t seen it. No water, Scully. Plumbing’s kaput. I’ve got some ice melting in buckets in the bathroom for you. We’ve got gas heaters a-plenty here, so go ahead and use one to warm yourself up a little make-shift bath if you want.”

The idea of warm water was suddenly the strongest aphrodisiac south of the equator. Scully made a bee-line for the bathroom and emerged some time later feeling almost restored to full-health, as squeaky clean as one can get using a big bucket and a little bucket to shower oneself in a cement cube hut in the snow. 

Mulder gave her the run-down as she settled back into the sleeping bag, wolfing down equal amounts of fresh water and – praise the Lord – some tuna out of a stack of cans Mulder had uncovered in the kitchen cabinet.

Mariner’s Hut appeared non-functional. There was a small supply of unperishable food, old maps and log-books from tenants five years ago; Drs A. Bishop and S. Abara. They’d left their initials on various bits of cutlery and technical equipment, as well as inside the covers of a small collection of books both fiction and scientifically oriented. The real issue was that the radio was fried. They had been banking on making it as far as Mariner’s then radioing Casey for help. Mulder had been at it for a day without rest. Like the plumbing: kaput.

“We’ll give ourselves two days to work on the radio. After two days, we’ll have to move on. It’s a five day hike to Casey from here if we move at a six-mile-day pace, granting the weather holds. The days are getting longer quickly. We could cut it to four days if we try, maybe three.”

“Mulder, in two days’ time, I might be about to go into fever again,” she told him. He had that look on his face she’d brought on by telling him she was dying two years ago, that buffering incomprehension doused by the light of terminal X-rays.

“Guess I’ll have to fix this radio then, huh?”

“Allowing failure, you might have to go to Casey alone and come back for me. This time with a rescue team, preferably.”

“Fat chance, Scully.”

“We need a Plan B, Mulder. Just keep it in the back of your mind, okay? It’s a logical option.”

He raised himself to be kneeling beside her. She was lying down, hugging herself for more warmth. On her cheek, his fingers were rough and welcome tactile reconnection to the world. He was a mountain peak on a plain.

“No,” he told her simply. Then he returned to the floor with his pliers and salvaged tech parts.

**Six**  
“You know, Antarctica is the only continent on Earth with no recorded history of supernatural phenomena.”

Mulder knew he had been mad-hattering non-stop all day, keeping himself entertained while wrestling to no avail with the ham radio. He was bent over the working desk by the one window, fighting a tension headache brought on by untended myopia and hours on a fiddly task. Scully walked by periodically and pressed a warm hand to his spine, reminding him of his posture. He considered the idea of slumping forward on purpose to lure her back.

“Guess which country just shot to the top of my honeymoon destination wish-list?” she called over from the kitchen. She had just finished up a thorough catalogue of their supplies, planning rations for multiple back-up scenarios, all of which he vetoed at the mention of separation. 

“Well, there is that one massive gravitational anomaly which was uncovered by geophysicists in 1960.” He paused, allowing time for rebuttal, but Scully remained mum. “It’s proposed to be a giant impact crater beneath the Wilkes Land ice sheet caused by a collision 250 million years ago resulting in the Permian-Triassic extinction, also known as the largest extinction event since the origin of complex life. Wilkes Land happens to be the very land upon which we now stand and out of which we, not so long ago, witnessed a giant spaceship emerge. Humour me, Scully, but what if that ‘collision’ from eons ago was just a crash-landing of a similar craft? And what if the one we saw emerge from the ice was one of the later, successful landers?”

“Mulder I swear to god,” Scully riled up from somewhere behind him. “…If you tell me that you believe one of the greatest extinction events to have ever struck the Earth since the emergence of multicellular organisms from the boiling, primordial clay, as well as the global catastrophe which, by the way, caused the cataclysmic detachment of Australia from the east coast of Antarctica….was the result of an _alien spaceship_ crash landing in the middle of the fucking South Pole, I will walk out into the ice right now and hope a blizzard takes me.”

He laughed down at his work desk sheepishly, holding the circuit board close to his face.

“Guess it’s safe to say you really aren’t an alien bounty hunter.” He glanced back to find Scully shooting him a predictable glare. “Just checking. The thought occurred to me.” There was a silence wherein he waited for Scully to start the next conversation. When she passed, Mulder took up the baton.

“The Arctic, on the other hand, chock full of supernatural history,” he attempted. His busy fingers were undergoing an expedited process of degenerative arthritis, aided by the permeating chill. Synovial snap-freeze. He decided to take a break before he threw up all over the radio, swiveling his chair around to face Scully. Cross-legged on her bed, she was combing through an old text-book on Antarctic avian ecology and conservation. Wilderness Scully had hair like satin burnt hills, like a rolling nimbus cloud at the red golden hour.

“I can feel your tail wagging, Mulder,” she said wryly without looking up from the page. “Go ahead, inform me.”

He crossed the room to be nearer to her. Scully had hunter-gatherered a Babylonian bounty of non-perishables from various naturally cooled storage niches in the hut. An assortment of beans, civil war-style hard track crackers, enough tuna to support an island of cats, Tang drink mix, and, in a discovery which was almost enough to coax him out of atheism, instant coffee. Ticking off a few more criteria on the lowest rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs had done wonders for their respective moods. Scully even smiled a little in welcome of his approach. He wanted to flop jovially onto the thin mattress beside her but he worried the force would send her flying off like a leaf. He sat down carefully.

“Well,” he began, “the Inuit peoples, for example, have as much mythology as any other in the world. The Kalaallit tribe have traditional stories about beasts like the _tupilaq_ , or the _anngiaq_ , which is a monster associated with infanticide or concealed miscarriage. They believe those creatures can be summoned by wrongdoing and inflict curses, or devour deserving victims whole. Even in the most barren environments, Scully, the harshest most inhospitable of places, rich stories out of the blankness. Magic and wonder, even in that oblivion canvas beyond these four walls. If human beings had stuck it out on this rock before the split of Pangaea, I guarantee you, there’d be records of the spiritual down here as well.”

“Mulder, of course there would be,” she said, predictably uncharmed. God, he loved her and her euphoria-inducing contrariness. Every time she opened her sardonic little mouth to contradict him, he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and say, “Thank you! Somebody hears me!” She slapped her book closed and turned her body towards him without breaking the contact between their upper arms. Human radiators, indispensable warmth. “Anywhere the human imagination takes root, it will create mythology. It will fashion theories to act as explanation for facts beyond its comprehension. Nothing real is ‘super’-natural. By definition, everything in existence is natural, even the unexplainable. The rest is confabulation and lore. Beautiful, rich, essential to human nature, I agree, but no mystery to me nonetheless.”

This was how they survived. This was how they got through their lives. The throw and catch of a mental potato. Other people made love or played cards. 

Hours later, back at the work desk, still no cigar. Mulder concentrated all his efforts on willing that tiny red bulb next to the ‘on’ sign to blink into life. The sun was officially tucked into the horizon, and the thought of this being their second last night together was a car tailing him on an empty highway. He went over the logistics of convincing her it wouldn’t be all that bad if they lived the rest of their days out together in the hut until the food ran out, like Thelma and Louise and an ice-shelf for a cliff. Or they could wait for the fevers to subside eventually, and then head out on the ice together as planned with what supplies they had left.

Scully wouldn’t hear it. She was on a different schedule, and her schedule involved dual survival at all costs. There was a fair amount of food stored at Mariner's, but not enough to sit around and twiddle their thumbs over viral pathophysiology far beyond her powers of prognosis.

He folded his arms and sunk his head down onto the table in anguish amped up for Scully’s benefit.

“I’m punching out for the night,” he announced into his forearms. What was difficult for a short-sighted man in daylight, was nigh impossible by the wavering light of a gas-lamp in the dark.

“You can turn around now,” Scully said. He had forgotten she’d even asked him to stay facing the wall. Obsessive tunnel vision had its perks. 

Upon the two-person dining table, Scully had arranged a childlike sampling platter of various de-canned delicacies. She’d set up a gas lamp at the centre of the rickety, circular table, drawn two wooden chairs to be facing each other, and poured them both a healthy serving of Tang in two scuffed glass cups she had scavenged from somewhere. Mulder had the impression of being two men on a candle-lit dinner down in the Vietnam War barracks, trying to recreate home. He kept an ear out for the M*A*S*H* theme song, turned his and Scully’s vague homoeroticism briefly over in his mind like a coin.

“Scully, are you trying to seduce me?”

She snorted. The way she laughed for him with her head dropped down and a curtain of hair Niagra Falling around her face turned him into a Christmas tree of a man. He went to pull her seat out.

“Thank you, Mr. Mulder,” she obliged. Back home, she mightn’t have been so easily charmed but they were making a palpable effort to be kind, treading carefully, he suspected, around probably impending and possibly indefinite separation.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked. He shuffled his own seat to be adjacent to rather than opposite her. The flame from the gas lamp rippled and pulsed in shadow and amber glow over the sharp and softened boarded hallway of her face. “I didn’t forget your birthday again, did I?”

She hid a smile and dipped her head, eyeing him with a side-glance. She had a little pouchy double chin he wanted to take a bite of like a steamed bao bun.

“It’s more of a ‘last night on earth’ banquet. A celebration of survival. And a thank you for coming after me.”

He nodded, watching her profile. Despite copious applications of salve and sunblock, she still had an ice burn across her cheeks. In the low light, he couldn’t tell it from a blush.

“You know what I’d be doing if I weren’t stranded in the freezer basement of the Earth right now?” she said, digging in to a little pool of baked beans. He forked a sardine. “I’d be drinking a cup of English breakfast, watching infomercials, getting ready for an early night, and probably fielding phone calls from you. Drink your Tang, Mulder. I don’t need scurvy on my ship.”

“I’m touched,” he said, taking an obedient slug of over-concentrated Tang and immediately regretting not swallowing his sardine chew first. “Actually you play a role in my fantasies too.”

She gave him the eyebrow without looking up from her plate.

“Is that right?”

“Sure. I’ve got this one scenario where you slink down to the basement office - pre-spontaneous combustion, of course - and sidle right up to me, lean over my desk all kitten-like and whisper something delectable about Lasseter’s Reef and the Bunyip and other incredibly plausible facets of Australian folklore.”

She huffed, rolled her eyes.

“Mulder, you don’t want that from me.”

She took a healthy sip of her own Tang and winced. Seeming to realise her miscalculation, she titrated a little more water from a flask on the table into both of their glasses.

“Maybe I do,” he contradicted for the sake of it. “And anyway, fantasies are not about realistic desires. Does anyone really want to be defiled by a sexy policeman with a little more in his pants than a long hard baton?”

“Do _you_ , Mulder?”

“That one was for the ladies. Off target?”

She shrugged her eyebrows.

“That’s for me to know,” she said, “and for a sexy policeman to find out.”

Mulder swallowed and an appetite which no amount of tomato-ey legume preserve would sate reared its little unmentionable head. 

“You ready for the pièce de résistance?” she asked. From somewhere beneath the table she materialized a loaf-sized prism wrapped tightly in baking paper which she peeled back delicately to reveal a dense, syrupy fruitcake, miraculously golden and intact. “It lasted five years in the cold without spoiling. Merry early Christmas, Mulder,” she said, and cut him a generous slice. They were both grinning, digging in, and their joy was like mottled sunlight.

Once their plates were cleared, he insisted on dish clean-up. The irony of the circumstances under which he and Scully found themselves achieving a moment of domestic bliss were not lost on him.

Scully was on her bed already, cocooned in a sleeping bag. She hadn’t commented on his established resting place on the floor beside her but, since the other twin bed across the room was nailed to the ground, she had taken the mattress off it and placed it under his sleeping bag. He took that as unspoken endorsement. 

A silence settled in the hut as night crept onwards unrelentingly. Scully watched him languorously as he made his way towards her. He stood over her. She was level with his thigh, looking up. He could dip a quill in her eyes. He would do anything for her. He could probably do anything to her. A glint flickered on her pillow-pink lips beneath the faltering ember splay of lamplight. Five years, two people in the lost world.

He lowered himself, sitting up with his lower half bunched into his sleeping bag so their faces were more or less at the same height, and he rested his temple on her mattress. Full bellies and ambient extremity drew them into each other with a premonition of renewed aloneness. Her chilly fingers left the reserve of her bed to find a thread in his hair. She was soothing him, breathing slowly, preparing him for something. With a heart like a plumb-bob dropped in a deep-diver’s trench, he let his eyes close, and she went over and over his scalp carefully.

Comparing Scully to myth was unfair. She was no Athena, she was not the Patroclus to his Achilles. Her hand in his hair was gentle and sorrowful like nothing else, and she was more human than a child whistling. She was the door knock he knew by instinct. He had an urge to seize her up, to say, _Don’t you know how lucky we are to have one true friend in the world?_

Her voice came softly, quelling.

“How much do you know about the race to the South Pole?”

Mulder’s own tenor was little more than a hum. He didn’t want to interrupt her hand moving. It was spilling lightness over his skin.

“December, 1911, Roald Amundsen conquered the southernmost point on the Earth, leaving his rival Earnest Shackleton a very disappointed man.”

“He came back though.”

Mulder continued on like an automaton search engine at her expectant prompt.

“Ernest Shackleton, in what is considered the last major expedition in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration returned in 1917 in an attempt to make man’s first voyage from sea to sea across the continent. But their ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice close to shore. He and his crew survived by launching lifeboats on a journey over seven hundred nautical miles, a feat often overshadowed by his ultimate failure. Mama Shackleton didn’t raise no quitter though, because the guy was back at it again in 1921, only to die on his ship, moored to an island nearby. Shoulda stuck to his day job.”

Her hand abandoned him for the warmth of her sleeping bag.

“It was the island of South Georgia. His wife asked for him to be buried there. Did you know that?”

He craned his neck to be facing her and shook his head.

“Around the same time,” she continued, “Captain Percy Fawcett was returning to the jungles of Brazil with his son. He’d made his first expedition in 1906 and he was convinced that he’d found evidence of a lost and ancient civilization: ‘Z.’ It was revolutionary at the time to suggest any civilized peoples existed beyond Western interference, but he was certain of the truth. Back then it would have been as ludicrous as suggesting the existence of extraterrestrials, for example. It haunted him that he’d gone home without proof so eventually he returned with his son. They disappeared into the jungle. His wife never learned of their fate.”

Mulder made a thoughtful sound. Their faces were close and she was watching his lips, somberly. 

“I had such a fixation on these men as a child, Mulder. Maybe it had something to do with my father, always serving something greater away from home. But it never occurred to me: who buries you? Who is denied burial? Women, upon the shoulders of whom these great men triumphed. Showing up as footnotes concerning either childbearing or the date they became a widow.”

“Is that how you feel about me?” he asked, and there was an edge to his voice that he found embarrassing. 

“This isn’t just about you,” she said, sparing him a glance. “I mean, am I my mother’s Fawcett? My brother’s Shackleton? Sometimes I think you and I forget we aren’t the only people in each other’s lives.”

“You’re right,” he said. “There’s a roaming churro vendor around the streets of Alexandria who’s gonna take a real blow from losing my business if I meet my fate down here as a man-sized popsicle.”

Her expression warmed and he was grateful to be out of rocky waters. Scully’s graveness was black ice.

“Mulder you are the worst tipper known to mankind.”

“I’m saving all my spare coins for the college funds of my future progeny,” he joshed and immediately the joke in her eyes became a facsimile. She gave a polite smile and nodded, turning from her side onto her back. Mulder halted, willing a re-opening of some door. But silence turned a key and he resigned, reaching behind himself to turn the gas lamp off and plunge them into the sub-zero dark. His quip had supposed a future from which she was inherently excluded.

The thin mattress caught his body with a sigh. He was aware of wind in a lethal orchestra beyond their four walls. No traffic, no advertising, no mail, no white noise. Not even money. Only the ice and the dark. They were alone. They were always that alone. In the pitch black, they could have been back in the basement, on the floor of his living room, in the Hoover Building parking lot under a car. Mulder drummed his fingers over his chest. He felt they were floating in the lightless space behind each other’s lids, eyes closed, together.

“I hate my body,” Scully’s breathed above him. 

“If you’re fishing for compliments, I’ve got a few whoppers on the line.”

“No, not like that,” she amended. He waited. The wind was a wailing widow outside. “Mulder, has it ever occurred to you that almost all your suffering has been a product of deliberate, admittedly often valiant self-endangerment, or otherwise inflicted vicariously via the sufferings of women you love? All of my blows have been directly applied. Without choice. The only choice I’m given is to- to carry on. To not let it get to me. But I know – when I sit across from you in our office, or in a meeting with Skinner, or at the dinner table with my family – Pfaster had me, looked at me. Schnauz had me. God knows how many men have had me in all the time that I’ve lost. No matter how many self-defence training courses I do in my spare time, no matter how good a shot I am or how many hours of sleep I lose to hypervigilance, my body gets bound, touched, opened up, diseased, gouged out, sterilised. I know it. I always have to know it. It’s dirty, embarrassing, like I’ve been touched up badly and it shows. I’m not expressing regret. But it’s no accident that you and I have dealt with the repercussions of our choices in very different ways. If you’re walking to your apartment at night, and you hear a man close behind you, what’s your first fear? That he’ll mug you? Even kill you? Now take a guess at mine.”

“Scully,” Mulder began, without another word to follow. His heart was a squeezed toothpaste tube. He felt like a hound-dog, nauseous at his own selfish, ape-like rage. He lay very still and let his jaw grind the work.

“It’s okay, Mulder,” she said distantly. “I’m not asking for pity or guilt. I’m just explaining to you why it is I need us to survive. And that if I ever see Donald Pfaster again, I’m going to shoot him point blank in the head.”

“Good,” was all he could say. He turned on his side to face her, but there was only blackness. He spoke to her soft through shadow. “What if a person and their body are separate things? You told me there’s something else that endures. I think of Samantha, and it makes me want to believe in- in a soul…or something untouchable.”

Secretly, Scully was the most blasphemous smear on his atheistic piety. It was impossible to behold her and deny the existence of an unquantifiable, internal force, a nobility christened by God.

“I’ve done more autopsies than I can remember. You hold enough cerebral cortices in your hand and you know there has to be more to a life than myelin and glial cells. But it’s not that simple. With violence - at first it feels intrusive all the way down, right into your soul, and then it becomes separate, and that’s worse. When it’s over, eventually, you crawl back to your body again.”

“Is that why you went to Ed Jerse? Why you got that tattoo?” She said nothing. He understood that her answer was sacred and private in a way that escaped him, like a whisper into the nook of a temple ruin. “Makes me fuckin’ angry, Scully. Makes me homicidal.”

“You think I’m not angry?” She choked up, forced it down. “You think I don’t hate feeling like a breeding cow or a fleshy ragdoll?”

Mulder thumped his own rage and reached up through the biting blindness towards her. He found her cheek wet and pulled taut. He thought of her when they’d met, her innocence, her bratty curiosity. He wished he’d touched her then before anyone else had the chance, as if he could have coated her with his scent and kept the dogs off.

“Scully,” he offered, open.

After a long moment, there was the sashay sound of a small body sliding out of a sleeping bag. Scully dropped down lightly and slipped into his sleeping bag without a word. It was impossible to see anything in the dark, but her breath was close and warm on his neck. She smelled like the stone-fruit drawer in a refrigerator. Her fists balled up on his chest. He ran his fingers carefully over the back-of-his-hand contour of her face, down her neck and her waist without light to guide him – he knew her by the orbit of atoms around the gravity every ounce of matter generates.

“That’s yours,” he whispered.

She brined his shirt without meaning to cry. Anger flowed sans permission and had a Dead Sea sterility. He touched her all over so she knew. Her fists unballed to knot into his shirt and her nails were sharp, insistent.

So strange that they were two adults. They paid taxes. They might have been commuters on a New York train. A man and woman in their thirties. Touching each other in a cement box on an emptiness like white hell frozen over. To be seen touching would be an assault. It was only another way of talking. It meant nothing new unless they wanted it to. They were not contained by understandings of the distinctly sexual or romantic. They were living on pure impulse on the extreme polar end of survival - if they tried to resist, they would die. But it was not a blind animal instinct either, drawing them to the nearest warm body; it was a centuries-old instinct, drawing them only to each other. In was only an extension of what they had been doing already out there on the ice; dragging each other along the crunch of old snow, filling each other’s mouths with water, conversing to stay sane, generating heat, and sleeping. Nothing else could exist.

Her chilly palms slid under his shirt. He shivered. Mulder pressed his face into her salted mane and inhaled. Her hands were moving over the Antarctic plains of his stomach, trailing up to brush over a scar under his left clavicle. She owned a dividend of his pain.

“I get the opposite way without you,” he said all at once into her hair. “Just a body, no soul. If we survive this, you gotta promise not to leave me. I start to feel like a fucking insane person. You’re my proprioception. You leave, and it’s like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank. I get like Kubrick’s man lost in space. I can’t tell if it’s the world that’s insane or just me.”

Even in the pitch blackness, when she pulled her head back, he could sense she was looking through him like a satellite passing waves through the spheres. Her breathing was deep and frightened. He could feel her heart on his ribs, breath sweet and citrusy from the Tang. Finally, she kissed him and her lips were the lap of the sea. She slid her leg between his. She wet his lips with her tongue and began drawing him down over her. Outside, all tides were enslaved to the moon.

Pulling away inspired from her an injured sound he filed quickly away for replay.

“Whoa, there,” he laughed breathless into her mouth. “I only have one good pair of pants.”

“I need to get warm,” she told him, and her voice was small and urgent. She sipped again at his lips, and he was turning into a lake. He heard the hummingbird thrum of her chest. 

Maybe it was the understanding that nothing out there really counted. Or that nothing back home counted while they were out there. Maybe it was the knowledge that they were on the front row seats of Robert Frost’s less preferred method of demise. Maybe love was survival. Maybe that love was so immense he didn’t mind being used if it helped. Better him than some divorcee schmuck with a penchant for girl-meat and psychotropic tattoos. Mulder would have let her hold him down under a pillow without thrashing if it brought her back to herself. Maybe it was always this game of catch-up in restoring what had been robbed from her at his side.

He groaned and moved with renewed rabidity and pressed her through the sleeping bag into the mattress with every part of his gate-crash body. Survival stripped them back to the roots. His hands were studious over the line dividing her tender underbelly and she lifted herself to his touch. Time obeyed the theory of relativity, and everything moved outwards from the centre. They were the singularity in a vacuum. He palmed her lower back, massaging the singe of her ouroboros. Ever correcting his course, she guided his hand from her back helpfully to the inner delta of her thigh. Berthing elicited an encouraging hiss from his trusty right-hand. He was whispering a bouquet of psychoses into the hollow of her mouth, her noble shoulder. She was a sea creature and she was silken and stung his skin like an anemone, moving bonelessly under the current of his burrowing weight. The skin over her chest was burning. He wrestled against the stuffy confines of the sleeping bag, pulling down her collar to taste as far south as he could like a newborn grappling to take root. She compelled him by the arch of her spine and an impatient scratch on his scalp. She touched him softly and he sucked a sharp breath.

“Is this okay?” she panted. 

Treading the thin line of ischaemia everywhere north of his sacrum, it took Mulder a moment to realise, with a start, that she was asking his permission. He nearly laughed out loud. 

Bewildered, he said, “You’re the only one who would ask.”

He sensed her really look at him then, envisioned the flash in her eyes, anger, this growing thing, extending its righteous hand towards him. Her love was a warpath. Her sadness was a sword. In a breath it morphed into something warm and tender. And then it was just Scully, and she wasn’t a sea creature or a general or a seraph or a saint. She was just a woman, his girl, an old friend and in need. Beyond them, ice gales were relentless and nothing out there was alive. Scully pulled him down slow and her hunger was as silent as anything.

**Seven**  
“Mulder, there! It’s right there!” Scully was a human periscope perched tip-toe atop the work table, pressing her face as close as she could get to the one small, high window in the hut without freeze-gluing herself to the pane.

“Careful there, barrelman, that’s not a crow’s nest, that’s my desk,” Mulder said, emerging from the bathroom behind her.

“It’s the albatross, Mulder. Quickly!” 

He pattered across the room and pulled a chair up beside her. He smelled like the bar-soap she’d discovered, linen and minty. Scully moved so Mulder’s freshly showered big head could peer out the window. She watched him expectantly, the odd sensation that they’d switched roles. It was scary to be a Mulder, needing confirmation of reality. After a polite period, her play-skeptic got down from the chair and tousled his wet hair with the towel around his neck, shrugging apologetically. Scully returned to the window, incredulous, and sure enough her companion had vanished into the icy blue ether.

“It was right there, Mulder,” she insisted. “Circling. She must have flown into a blind spot above the hut.”

“She?” He threw her a bemused and sympathetic look from beneath the shimmy of his towel. Scully pinched her nose bridge. Perhaps it was just an aura of oncoming fever and she felt at her neck and brow as she hopped down to the chair then the ground. Mulder caught her unnecessarily, a light hand at her arm and hip which he let linger until registering Scully’s gaze avoidance. He released her and sauntered easily back to the bathroom, probably to take advantage of the make-shift toothpaste she had fashioned out of a box of stale bi-carb soda.

Scully took a seat and fiddled mindlessly with the radio parts. Even in the fucking Antarctic, he was the one with the desk. Ship radios, she could work with. But she’d taken as much of a crack at this ham as Mulder and kaput was kaput was kaput. He gargled and spat and splashed a little in the sink.

“Maybe it’s a spirit guide,” he suggested, re-emerging. 

“Mulder, no,” she knee-jerked.

“Many communities of Native Americans believe in spirit guides from the animal world.” He shrugged on his parka, fluttering his breath through his lips and rubbing his own arms from the chill. “I doubt they’d have an albatross, but the hawk, for example, is a symbol of a messenger and guardian. We could do with one of those. Coffee?”

Scully had her head in her hands, elbows propped up on the desk. She groaned in the affirmative. 

Coffee turned out to be just what the doctor needed, because by the time they were throwing their grounds down, Scully felt less like a schizophrenic and more like a failed scientist. She was sitting on the kitchen bench, legs swinging, and Mulder was leaning adjacent to her against the long disused sink. Cupping their mugs doubled as a warming mechanism and something to do with their newly employed hands.

The previous night had gone without mention. Scully had woken up early, cleaned up, and prepared them both a hearty breakfast of half-a-decade old Civil War style hockey puck crackers and a batch of instant coffee. When Mulder eventually rose shortly after dawn, she said nothing because he said nothing because she said nothing et cetera.

Scully watched him swirl the remnants of his coffee in his mug, wondering if he was - God have mercy - performing tasseography. Caffeography? She wanted to suck his fingers. She looked away, then looked back.

This situation stood as such: That she loved him as a friend was established. That she was attracted to him as a man was clear. Danger lay in the realisation that perhaps, superimposed upon these feelings, she was beginning want things which she could in no way dare to expect. Perhaps she wanted safety, a guarantee, a family, the rest of his days, and even to be pursued a little back in normal society, made to feel like an allure and a home instead of a side-kick or a nurse or a crutch. And perhaps she was really unsalvageably in love with him in a way that would never come out in the wash. He caught her staring and she hopped down from the counter and left.

In war, soldiers stranded far from home and constantly on the front-line of death could easily turn to the women of local towns for solace without feeling they were cheating on their sweethearts back home. In a way, she and Mulder were both the lonely soldiers and the sweethearts back home. That is to say, she had asked him for it, and he had obliged most willingly. Would she ask again that night? Probably. It might be their last night together. As well as that, their silence was in part a result of the mystifying and strangely comforting unspoken knowledge that they would be touching each other again in some hours. But she knew, as clearly as she knew that Mulder was right about the albatross without needing to admit it, that once they were back home, what happened in the trenches, stayed in the trenches. Nothing was real on the ice.

Scully busied herself by the bookshelf. She let Mulder waste his time on the radio. She knew him and she knew he’d pâté smear his brain across the wall if it made him feel like he was doing anything to prevent their inevitable separation.

“I have a good feeling about the radio today,” he called from his little workshop.

“Great,” she said, running her knuckles over dusty spines on the lowest shelf. She had spent half the morning packing for him and splitting up supplies nonetheless. She would get them home, and Mulder could kick and scream the whole way.

One book caught her attention as being leather-bound and un-titled. She plucked it out and jumped onto her bed to thumb it through. The book revealed itself as a journal belonging to the last tenant from five years ago. It fell open to an entry dated July 18th, 1993, which read so in steady cursive:

**_All day is all night. There is a solidity to darkness, like a block you can lie underneath. Samson is thinner than when we arrived. Beard hides it. Food is getting more bland. Should radio for Pizza Hut. Samson misses his daughter. I am restless and miss my life. We don’t talk about it. Instead we make the same warm mistake every night. And night is all day is all night.  
\- Aliyah._ **

The page was bookmarked by an old photograph taken in the early summer months of 1993. A young black woman and an older black man, both very handsome. They were standing side by side outside the hut’s front door, posing with optimism and new spirit, bundled up thoroughly in the snow. The woman’s dark face shone out from her fur-lined hood, a sharp jaw and a smile like an scientific essay. The man was a little taller and much wider, with a quiet look and an impressive ebony beard, peppered with silver at the chin. So these were Drs A. Bishop and S. Abara.

Scully was interrupted by the bright peal of Mulder’s laughter. She looked up, caught off guard. He was twisted in his chair to look back, wearing a wrinkling smile like a spring chime.

“What?” she asked, with a pre-disapproving chuckle.

“I just realised,” he grinned stupidly. “You’re a Pisces.” And he laughed again heartily. The humble lines fanning out from his smile and the folds in his Antarctic scruff and his obstinate disarming hope and the ice-lit twinkle in his far-flinging eyes swept in around her like the first snow of Christmas.

Occasionally, once in a lifetime, someone sees your strangeness and doesn’t bat an eyelid. Occasionally, you open your front door to a person tapping their foot like they’ve been waiting for you to come down. Occasionally, there is the laughing frown, the question, two unsure chance-meets beholden by something obscure. Occasionally, somebody gets it. If you’re lucky, you make a quick deal and march on. Then it’s one made of two again one.

*

A few hours after sundown and they were lying in bed: Scully up above, Mulder down below, the former pretending she wasn’t going to force Mulder to leave the next day, the latter pretending he wasn’t going to refuse her outright, and the both of them pretending to be ready for sleep and not, instead, waiting for the lights to go out.

“Scully, you ever read the opening epic in Book One of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?” He bounced to be lying on his side, his head propped up on his palm. His hair was loose and boyish, reaching his eyes the way it had on the day they’d first met, but his cheeks were fuller then and not covered in a bristly beard.

Scully used her thumb as a placeholder in Dr Bishop’s journal. She’d started back at the beginning and so far it was nothing but detached archiving of daily chores and findings. It entertained her; Bishop had the unnecessary flair that reminded Scully of reading Mulder’s case reports.

“Mulder, if you’re about to recite poetry to me in an effort to woo me or otherwise drive me insane, might I remind you it’s in your interests that I actually maintain a desire to keep you alive?”

“The opening poem is titled The Creation-”

“Christ Almighty.”

“And it begins by describing the world, our world, before it was shaped by the gods. Its primordial state. It says, according to my preferred translation by A.D. Melville, that ‘in the whole world the countenance/ Of nature was the same, all one, well named/ Chaos, a raw and undivided mass,/ Naught but a lifeless bulk.’ Out there on the ice, while we were lugging it ho, I could barely remember my own name. But those words were running out in front of me like the Star Wars opening crawl. All one, well named Chaos. Y’know, and that’s where we are.”

Sometimes, all she could do was just laugh.

“You amaze me, Mulder,” she said, turned on her side to face him. He was watching her with an innocent, ingenious curiosity, as though he could not guess what she meant, as though he saw nothing out of the ordinary in anything he’d ever done. “Really, you do. I never see you studying, hardly ever. So how do you do it? You know the month and year of every historical event ever recorded and you’ve memorized the X-Files line for line; you know Ovid and William Blake off by heart; you know Moby Dick better than I do; you can recite whole passages of every Abrahamic script; and you’ve got every obscure newspaper clipping with a story worth half a damn stored away in the archives of your mind. How? When do you get the time?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I really do have an Eidetic memory?”

“No one has,” she said. Unimpressed was her resting expression. “It hasn’t been proven to exist.”

Mulder shrugged, unruffled.

“Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t?”

He was ridiculous. She pressed her eyes closed and laughed again, enamoured.

“It’s fitting you should live in Alexandria,” she said, fighting a sudden panic at the thought of him leaving. “I don’t know how many years, but I’ve been sitting on a joke - that all the lost Libraries of Alexandria are stored in your head - are you - centuries worth of knowledge, and now burned, like The X-Files. But I couldn’t figure a way of saying it without inflating your head to the size of Citi Field.”

She caught a dependable flicker of deviousness as he twirled the idea in his mind. 

“That makes you my sexy librarian.”

“Right,” she said. If she were allowed, she would have bitten him.

She liked him best when they were completely alone. He was embarrassing and incorrigible and often uninspiringly slutty, but it was obscene that someone should see him in the street, buying a hot dog on a corner, and mistake him for a regular guy. Privacy was their first shared secret, a guard against the insult of incomprehension. 

“You have a big day tomorrow. We should get some sleep.”

She flopped onto her back and awaited the dim of the gas lamp behind him. She was restless for him. There were wires clipped to her belly and the current was flowing in slow. Five years of resistance, the circuit resistor grows warm.

When the light stayed on and Mulder stayed uncharacteristically mute, doubt returned like an old carousel.

To the ceiling, she said, “You haven’t mentioned Diana in a while.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Did you ever get to see her in the hospital?” Scully noticed a verde lichenoid growth in the ceiling corner and wondered how anything could possibly grow out of freezing old stone.

“I spoke to her on the phone a few days before bee-mageddon. She’s okay, she’s breathing.” Outside, the wind picked up and battered all things in its path. The gas lamp light was a low yellow-brown, whispering. Mulder sighed. “There’s no bad blood between us. She’s a good person. She cares about doing good work. Shit happens, y’know, life. Being honest, I don’t even remember getting married.”

“What?” Scully turned to look at him then. He was facing the ceiling, arms crossed in his sleeping bag like Wednesday Addams in bed. 

“I was in deep on a profiling case. Imagine John Lee Roche meets Mostow’s obsession with demonic gargoyles. A few weeks passed and I suddenly realised I’d solved the case and gotten married without knowing which hemisphere I was in. Two Rubicons with the one psycho acid trip.”

“I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “That’s sad.”

“Only if you believe marriage means anything.”

“You don’t?”

He glanced in her direction and then meekly down at his feet.

“No, I do. I don’t know why I said that.”

Scully considered the irony that, in all probability, the ceremony of marriage meant more to him, the faithless apostate, than it did to her, a grim Irish Catholic. He preempted her query, continuing on thoughtfully.

“I like the ceremony of it. The institution and creed don’t matter to me. But even in nature, Scully, you see evidence of complex and artful mating rituals – like the dance that swans perform, for example. We’re just animals. I like the idea that for millennia people have acted out rituals to bind one person to another, like stepping on a glass or smelting a ring or placing a floral necklace over each other has some kind of childlike magic in it. There’s a human sanctity in that, God or no god.”

Divorced and a child of divorce, and the kind of hope that would probably kill him. She was seized by a love so immense.

“If you could design your own ceremony, what would it be?” he asked casually. She blinked, took a breath to buy time.

“I don’t know. Something equalizing. Something that blurs the lines between self and other. But nothing that could be done by accident, not an exchange of water or blood.” She was thinking of the sanguine mess of a case he’d made during her first abduction.

“Choice,” Mulder suggested. 

“Yes. Choice is truthful.”

For once, they believed the same thing. It bred a moment of camaraderie then made them quickly, nervously unsure. They cleared their throats, said goodnight. Mulder snuffed the only light that was burning for miles. 

Of all the men who had wanted her sincerely and promised security, of all good kind men who were easy to love and stay with, of all the men who might have kept her safe, filled her home with children, of all the genuine hard-working men, even Skinner, who was solid and calm and honest, of all the men and women in the world, only him. 

The wind carved over ice distantly.

“It’s cold tonight,” Mulder offered.

Thank God. She went down to be with him at last.

This time, they went slow. A bronze coin circling a drain. He was overwhelming, tranquilising. His beard was rough, his body fought hers carefully. The ice was all around her. Warmth was all around her. God was all around her. Well named Chaos was all around her. And Mulder, Mulder - all places. 

**Eight**  
One minute after midnight, it was November 27, 1973, it was September 23, 1998. There was a deafening hum up above. In a moment, chaos unnamed flooded in. Cacophony ghastly unsound. There was a screaming flare and all matter caved out, being drawn to a harmonised light. The marrow drill noise, the pacemaker of a man in ventricular fibrillation. Mulder was twelve and paralysed. Mulder was thirty-six and screaming out Scully’s name. Not again, not this girl. The horror of coming face to face with what he’d searched the world for. The door was blown open, and the gale winds harrowing true, tunneling right through the hut.

Then all fell bitterly still. There was no wind and no air. In the untime, Mulder found Scully across the room, walking calmly towards the neon whiteness. It was flooding like a ghost through the door. She had redressed at some point. Mulder fought a paralysis so strong it might have killed him if she’d made it much further but he managed a great leap, throwing her down to the ground, pinning her under his heightened gravity. He was completely naked. The silence shot through his eardrums and the pain was mammoth intense. Scully was limp beneath him, slipping out from under his weight.

The hut began to vibrate. It was Gog and Magog groaning up out of the ice. Books missiled themselves from the shelves. The glasses in the kitchen came loose, exploding. The window blasted inwards, the ice thrashed through the hut in one blow. All around, the white glow, taking a woman away. “NO!” was his decades old scream. Incoming, the ham radio frazzled on. Mulder was a desperate man, he was living a desperate dream and he made a desperate choice, shouting for his life, hoping somebody would hear.

“TWO AGENTS STRANDED AT MARINER’S HUT. MOVING EASTWARDS TOWARDS THE OCEAN. DESTINATION CASEY STATION AS THE CROW FLIES. THIS IS AN S.O.S. CALL! WE NEED HELP! WE-”

All ceased, transmitters, receivers. The light, the hell sound, the broken radio, the compelling upwards sky draw. In the returned dark, the door hung timidly unhinged on its jamb and the debris of lost time remained all over the floor. Mulder could not swallow, couldn’t breathe. He rolled off his partner and felt blindly for her pulse. She was out and she was burning up quick in his arms. 

**Nine**  
Sounds of the city flew past, the morning traffic, a horn blare. Children were trailing a ribbon in the wind and their joy came in passing screams and titters. Doors in every hallway creaked and slammed shut. The Maryland forest sprouted up from the ice around her and her brothers peeked out from the trunks. _Hide and seek, we’re waiting._ But the trees were replaced with women, all bald and pallid and small. They rose their arms in unison and touched the backs of their necks. On contact with their cervical spine they disappeared with a puff into smoke. Up from the charred vapours reared a flame so intense it could be none other than a man with a wiry frame and a pin-up tattoo and a look of tender regret. He too was swallowed up and the fire consumed itself into a black vacuum of nothing but the howling wind and the ice. Two identical girls, one on each side. One grew tall to be her sister then fell with a sudden blow to the head, trailing in a body heap as Scully was dragged ceaseless on. The other girl kept up, then she slowed and turned green and melted into the snow, stunned with agony. Scully was alone, moving on. The blackness was livened with the ice and the wind on her skin. Overhead, an albatross soared. For a moment she knew: she knew the compass in her hand was her father, the Northern Star she followed was her daughter, the choir sunrise was Melissa, the flaming sunset was Bruckman, and the secrets of the night were Jerse, Aliyah Bishop was Mulder and Samson Abara was herself, existing together in every life, the wind whipping was every monster she’d killed, and the albatross was all her great love. It was a strange boy with Mulder’s colouring and a miraculous glint in his eye. Every day a new sign. Maybe she wished her grief would haunt her. Maybe it was better to be haunted than abandoned and alive in this world.

*

Scully woke with a jolt. She was on a moving sled, in a sleeping bag. Her face was wrapped in clothing. Her nose was being sawed off by the cold. The sled scraped along the ice and the sky was an arm’s length above her, deathly charcoal. The wind was full and furious and blind white. The sled stuttered to a halt. She blacked out.

When she came to again, Mulder was blowing hot air on her frostbitten nose. She started and pushed him away, scrambling to sit up. It took a moment to orient herself. They were back in the tent and the walls were being hammered and frosted by a blizzard outside. It was far below freezing, even with the gas lamp between them. It took only another moment for Scully to realise they were going to die.

Mulder was already barreling onwards with an explanation she tuned in to after he was halfway through.

“-weather changed without warning. Can you believe it’s noon outside? I couldn’t see a damn thing. It’s like the end of the world out there, Scully.”

Scully swallowed, processing. Her throat was freeze-burned and she was sore and glacially cold. Otherwise, she felt fine. Mulder jumped to hand her a flask of water and she sipped it with difficulty.

“How long was I out?” she asked. The wind was coming through the tent and the gas lamp flickered feebly. She had to repeat her question, half-yelling to be heard over the storm.

“A day and a half,” he informed her at a matched decibel. “I hauled you on the sled, but it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. You’ve lost weight.” He was breathing heavily, watching her reaction.

“Mulder,” she reared up, “are you insane?!”

He blinked a few times, looked around as though there was anyone else she might be addressing out there. A gust sledgehammered the tent and she toppled forward into his arms then jerked back.

“What was the alternative?” he yelled. “Leave you alone in the hut?”

“Yes!”

Mulder looked as though he’d been struck.

“Do you know how many times I’ve walked into a room expecting to find you dead? On a bridge full of burned carcasses, I was looking for your bones carbonised. I looked for you in the face of hooker dumped on a slab in the morgue. Yesterday night was the worst night of my life repeated. And as it turns out, if I’d left alone, I would have died out here anyway and you would have followed suit soon enough. I couldn’t leave you to be taken.”

“Taken by whom?” She was so cold. She couldn’t remember warmth. She couldn’t remember not feeling hungry or not shivering all the time.

“The ship- the ship came back to take you. Or maybe they came to help us,” Mulder rattled. “The radio came on-.”

“Who, Mulder? And why?”

“Maybe they want us to be found.”

She was shaking so much she couldn’t see.

“They- I can’t fucking believe this.”

“For fuck’s sake, Scully,” he shot back with startling volume. “You’re kidding me right? This time I know what I saw. And you know too! This is my whole life! Even if science refutes it, your science is wrong. When we get back-”

“Mulder, there is no getting back, and it’s not my science. I’m not concocting it out of thin air just to torture you. You’ve only had The X-Files for a few years longer than I have. I believe you. Where does that leave us? Would you have had me go in front of our superiors with only that faith as evidence in support of our work? None of that matters now. Look where we are!”

“When we get back - when we get back,” he went on, eyes darting askance. Scully thought he’d officially gone over the cuckoo's nest. The storm threw itself in full force against the tent and the gas lamp appeared to go out completely for seconds at a time before flickering back on. “When we get back you’ll have the evidence in hand, the bee. Then you can say it.”

“No, Mulder!” she burst, beside herself. “Listen to me! We are not getting back! We are going to _die_ out here! And frankly I don’t care if it was aliens or Yankee Doodle-Doo. The fact of the matter is my abduction was facilitated by _men_ \- human _men_. I was taken and sterilised and poisoned by _men_. Samantha was abducted by _men_. Melissa was killed by _men_. My daughter-” Her throat seized and she choked on the cold and her pain. When she could breathe, she tried again. “As a scientist and your partner, I care about proving the existence of non-Earthly life. But as an agent of the law and as a woman who has seen _no_ justice for the pain inflicted upon myself and others, and on you and the life that you’ve lost, flashing lights in the sky aren’t enough! I want someone to punish, to suffer for what they have done!”

There was a long pause in which the eye of the storm encased them in the silence preceding slow death.

“I love you, Scully,” he said. The fire glowed in his face. “Don’t ask me to choose which cross I should bear.”

Scully met his gaze silently. Choice was ceremony, choice was the binding of souls. She would never ask him. She would never expected anything. No, she would do what she had always done. She would work and she would survive at all costs.

“Give me a knife,” she said, “and hold out your arm.”

*

Her plan was the plan of a fist thrusting up from a grave. In the brief years she had spent growing up in Japan, her father had allowed her to observe a winter survival course her brothers had enrolled in after much begging on her part. If she survived, she would have her kindergarten stubbornness to thank.

She and Mulder were out in the elements. The whiteout conditions were intolerable and they were working half blind. She’d bled them both one litre from a nick at their median cubital veins, Mulder a little more; most people could lose 14% of their blood volume without experiencing much more than light-headedness, but the compounded effect of being malnourished and probably hypothermic and rigid with panic was making Scully profoundly dizzy as she and Mulder stood, two lunatics in the blizzard outside, digging at a snow dune with a shovel and the lid of the first-aid kit which Mulder had packed on the sled. Temperatures might have been negative twenty. It was impossible to feel anything but a sort of soul-deep burn and numbness, and their exhaustion was matched only by their unfathomably strong will to live.

Scully lost feeling in her left arm first. She bent down to scoop more snow from the dune, tunneling out a snow cave. It was the only thing that might keep them alive until help arrived, if ever it did. She was vaguely aware of unconsciously sobbing from exhaustion. The tears froze against her face. Breaths came raggedly, sometimes not at all. Mulder, a few feet away from her, was blurred by the snow pelting between them. She bent down again for another haul but her knees gave way and Mulder had to come lift her up from the ice. The tent flew off. They exchanged a look. The roar of the storm was too loud to say anything. That she had survived so much - gunshots to the head, cancer, unthinkable grief - only to freeze to death and never be found…She reached for the shovel and bent down again. 

Mulder trudged back to his spot, leaning forward against the wind. A crack sounded, thunder through the ground, and a crevice opened, taking him in. She saw him fall. She saw the wild look in his eyes as he found her face through the snow, as he fell through the earth and was gone.

Scully screamed out his name. She ran after him, flattened herself on the ground and army-crawled to the crevice edge. It was a crack in sea ice – they must have made it closer to the coast than they’d thought. The ice shone electric blue and silent deep down inside. Only Mulder, clinging on to the ledge with both hands, was a splash of violent life in the crust. She gripped both his arms.

“MULDER!”

His face was torn through with effort and she was crying out in animal strength, trying to haul him back up, but she could hardly feel her own arms, and Mulder was struggling hard. They locked eyes with a question so full of intensity that it could only be summed as, “Is this it? Is that all we get?”

Mulder’s hands were slipping - she couldn’t feel, but she saw. She squeezed her eyes shut and cried out and pulled desperately.

Out of nowhere, an engine sound bellowed over the gales and through the midday whiteout darkness, Scully saw the penetrating beam of white lights. She didn’t care – aliens, men, angels – she didn’t care.

“HELP!” she screamed for all she was worth. For his life, for hers. “HELP! OVER HERE!”

Behind a dashboard, two strangers drove without hope through a blizzard not far from their station. In the snowstorm-scape they saw a message, an S.O.S. sign: a flashlight aimed at a snow dune, and underneath the beam throw, a giant X, splashed in blood on the ice.


	14. It Rose Now Glacial and Stark

Some jobs come with dental cover. Diana got a hole in the lung.

The phone rang the moment she opened her front door. She crossed to the window and surveyed the street below, closed the shutters, moved stiffly to the landline by the living room couch. Six weeks had her back on her feet, just barely. She was a car dealership Tube Guy with a duct tape square over a punched-out canyon.

“Get your men off me,” she said, answering the phone. The armchair caught her with a Welcome-Back! confetti dust cloud that said, _No one lives here but you._ It irritated her lungs but to cough would be to cede dignity. “You couldn’t get me in a toe tag so you settled for a few eyes on my back, is that right?”

Over the line, static obscured the sound of a drag.

“That’s an odd way to express gratitude,” said the quasi-man on the other end.

“You tried to kill me.”

“Agent Fowley, I think you misunderstand how secure this line is. And more importantly, you misunderstand my intentions. How shall I put this?” He paused for the effect of thinking, as though it took effort to communicate with simpler minds. She caught her reflection in the mote-brushed antique mirror hanging over the mantlepiece. She looked old, felt Mesozoic. He took another hissed pull. “Let’s just say that the only thing harder than painting the Mona Lisa, is rendering an identical fake. You’d do well to remember that I don’t make mistakes.”

Diana rose with a stifled wince and headed for the medicine cabinet in hunt of some PRN Aspirin. For what it was worth, she believed him. She understood his rationale. Mulder made paranoids look like attention-seeking amateurs; he would have second guessed her renewed allegiance sooner or later, even if more distrustful of her supportive warmth than anything politically suspect. A near-death experience would be enough to justify her renewed interest, her more compatriotic approach. Being found in the belly of the big bad wolf would be enough to convince Mulder that she was the real deal grandmother. It mightn’t occur to him that Big Baddy might have eaten another wolf in costume, not when he was so desperate for a warm hug from ol’ Nan. And, after all, she’d heard the rumours about JFK. Begrudgingly, she allowed that her would-be assassin was a man who could not afford to aim stray. And she was a consequentialist utilitarian herself. She would have done exactly the same thing.

The only painkillers in the bathroom cabinet were out of date. No one else’s out of date medications. No blue-is-for-boys toothbrush in the stand next to hers. She dragged herself rigidly into bed.

“You’re officially back from the dead?” she asked, rubbing at the electric drill between her eyes. He had been waxing on about Renaissance analogies for his artistic militaristic finesse while she’d been on her analgesic pursuit. 

“Officially, I don’t exist.” 

Diana was fatigued enough that it took conscious effort not to groan or laugh at that line. Someone was driving a glowing poker through her left upper lobe.

“I just arrived home from the hospital. I’m exhausted. What’s the purpose of this call?”

“The X-Files have been reopened.”

Diana felt an errant moment of triumph.

“I thought you said you don’t make mistakes.”

“The only mistake I ever made,” he said, exhaling so deliberately into the receiver that she could taste burning tar, “was in allowing Bill and Teena Mulder to send off their daughter instead of their son.”

Another accidental moment of pride.

Diana remembered she was still wearing her heels. Apparently Alex Krycek, Consortium delivery boy of the week, thought the inpatient dress code at Bethesda Hospital was metropolitan workplace chic. She kicked her pumps off onto the floor where no one was at risk of falling over them but herself.

“Mulder will be very pleased,” she noted, neutrally.

“Mulder will not be resuming his position. The X-Files is yours, along with an Agent Jeffrey Spender. He’s a promising young man. I have a particular interest in his progression at the FBI.”

“You can’t do that,” she said, making the mistake of sitting up too quickly. The muscles over her left ribs seized up in rebellion. “You can’t take it from him and give it to me. Mulder will hate me.”

“Mulder will be glad to have a friendly face looking out for him from the inside, with no choice but to trust you.”

“His partner won’t be so easily convinced.”

“Agent Scully’s survival was unexpected but not disastrous, and placed in a position of menial bureaucracy, she’ll be mostly out of your hair. Actually, her recovery from the virus has been most enlightening. She required a second dose of anti-virals, administered without fuss by a man we have down at Casey Station – there were some cyclic pyretic sequelae – but now she appears back in full health. She has always been a model specimen.”

An inconvenient surge of disgust, misplaced protectiveness. Despite it all, Diana felt a certain nausea at the idea of that pruned old cancerous man having reign over any woman’s body, even the young homewrecker’s - fondling her, purveying.

“Is that all?” Diana asked after an expectant pause, a hand over her eyes. Her bed was too big for one person. She thought of Mulder sleeping on his couch in her absence and felt sick and weary.

“Yes,” was the miffed response. He didn’t like his payloads of information to be received without some amount of awe or terror. “I do apologise for the inconvenience of having to deal with the inevitability Agent Scully snapping at your heels. You were right that she acts as a sort of pacemaker for Mulder. She wasn’t intended to come back from Antarctica alive. Who could have predicted the lengths that one man would go to for a woman sent to shut him down? Then again, I’m not immune to the compulsions of momentous love. That too, I suspect, will be useful to you. Since you have the advantage of being so…above it all.” 

There was a click, and the smell of smoke vanished with the many heavenly miles suddenly reopened between them. Diana breathed. It hurt. She placed the phone clumsily on the bedside table. She turned her face into the pillow to block out the noon light blaring down through the curtains into her eyes. She gave herself one day to recover. One day to be sick with human dejection. Tomorrow, another hole punched in the work docket of her life. So it goes.

She dreamt of Dana Scully. 

In her dream, the scientist and her ex-husband were stepping off from a small private plane, returning to the Land of the Free. The propellers were drowning out every sound, pummeling them with air, and they huddled into each other, turning away from crowds of government officials, journalist vultures, the sensory overload of liberated capitalist life, all life, all sound, all unfeeling cacophonous dissonance beyond the existence of their two-man survival team. Walter Skinner urged them forward as one body, clearing a path through the crowds with a blazing, bodyguard ferocity, a barrel of a man shielding Princess Di and her latest beau from the barrage of epileptic strobe flashes and men in suits calling their names and groping hands and pitiless American greed. 

Mulder had one arm around his partner, effectively tucking her into the stooped pathos of his ancile body. He had lost weight, he was pale, his hair had been cut unstylishly in the fashion of medical pragmatism. They made it to a black government-issued sedan on the crowded tarmac. Walter Skinner was barking at the caravan of men to draw on some non-existent reserve of human decency, growling, ushering his two greatest inconveniences in life into the car as camera flashes glinted off his noble, furious head.

And Scully - there was a glimpse of her as she ducked into refuge escape. The woman looked ravaged upon. Her skin was glacial, pallid, her posture cagey and frail. She had been burned by the cold and her hair was darkened and clammy. Perhaps the right response would have been pity. But, from beneath Mulder’s arm, Scully threw a last hateful glance back at the world beyond the car. Diana thought of Cabadel’s _L’Ange Dechu_. The fallen angel. Hellfire’s auburn rumbling hair. The descent most scorching, divine. The fear, the disgust at pity. And from behind a strong arm, one savage Aegean eye.


	15. Relics of an Outmoded Design

BLINDED BY A SEARCHLIGHT – HANDS – IV FLUIDS – CASEY STATION – TWENTY MAN CREW – HOW DID YOU SURVIVE OUT THERE – THIS IS JUST AN INJECTION TO HELP YOU SLEEP BETTER – PRIVATE PLANE – SKINNER ON THE TARMAC – TOO MANY MEN – FLASHES – CAMERAS – TRAFFIC LIGHTS – SPEED LIMIT SIGNS – PARKING TICKETS – MAGAZINE SAYS: WHAT IF YOUR KIDS GROW UP TO HATE YOU – WHERE’S THE EVIDENCE – COCA COLA – EVERYTHING IS MONEY EVERYTHING IS A NAKED WOMAN EVERYTHING IS ON THE VERGE OF WAR – BRAS – SWEAT – MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF PAIRS OF WHITE EYES – SATELLITE WAVES – CARCINOGENS – DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED OUT THERE – KETO DIETS – FROHIKE FEEDING THE FISH – CAR INSURANCE – HAIR GEL – STREETWALKERS STUFFED IN A DUMP – GUNSHOT TO THE STOMACH FOR A COUPLE BUCKS IN A PURSE – KIDS ON DRUGS – EBOLA VIRUS – X-RATED CINEMAS – DISCIPLINARY HEARINGS AT THE FBI – WOMEN WITH PERFECT TEETH AND CHUBBY BABIES – MEN WITH NICE CARS – CIGARETTE BUTTS – RATS ON THE SUBWAY – EMBRYOS IN BRIGHT GREEN TEST TUBES – BUSES EVERY MINUTE – YOU’VE LOST THE X-FILES – GO HOME – WATER YOUR PLANTS – SWEEP YOUR FLOOR – SHOW UP ON TIME – TURN ON THE TV – CALL YOUR MOTHER – BUY A NICE HOUSE – LOOK AWAY – THERE IS NO TIME FOR THE TRUTH

-

The ice had been simple. Outside, you died. Inside, the odds were slightly more in your favour. They stayed warm, they stayed fed, they stayed together, stayed alive. It took less than an hour for them to wonder why they’d fought so desperately to return and save a world that was relieved when they were gone.

-

Mulder didn’t realise he was alone until he arrived home. He hadn’t been inside his apartment since moments before Scully walking out on him, touching her face, the bee sting, ice. He was the human embodiment of television static. Stepping into his living room was like coming out of a cheap magician’s hypnosis. He felt naked without an Antarctic parka so he threw his Navajo blanket roughly over his shoulders even though it was too warm and just sat in shock on the couch. He thought of the look Scully had given him the moment before they’d dropped her off at the curb in front of her mom’s. Stunned panic, the uncertainty of a child being passed into a strange adult’s arms. Her glass eyes wide, the car door slamming shut between them. They were both too overwhelmed to realise they could protest against anything that was happening to them. Sensory overload in the severe.

Maybe an hour passed. He was still on the couch, blinking, forgetting not to be cold. He picked up the phone and dialled.

“Mulder,” came the immediate answer. Her voice was hushed and there was the muffled sound of bedsheets. Mulder had the sensation of calling a teenage girlfriend late at night, both of them worrying they’d wake up her father. “Are you okay? Did you get home safe?”

“Long story, but I’m in the North Pole.”

“That’s not funny,” she whispered, but he could hear an exhausted smile.

He lay down slowly, carefully, along the couch, unsure how this was his life. Get thrown in a gulag. Go to the dentist. Almost die in Antarctica. Don’t forget to pay your electricity bill.

“You’ve probably had enough of me to last all of your nine lives, hey, Scully?” he joked, believing himself. He heard her take a deep breath, exhale softly into his ear. Miniature tractor beams subjected the hair follicles on the back of his neck to anti-gravity pull.

“It has been well-observed that people subjected to intense or prolonged shared trauma, relying on each other to survive, emerge wanting to be strangers. There were two British journalists kidnapped and held hostage together for months in the Congo, subjected to unimaginable abuse, particularly on the part of the woman – I hardly need elaborate. Anyway, on the inside they had a bond so intense it felt like they would die if they were apart. Then, a few months after being rescued, they could hardly stand to talk on the phone. It reminded them too much of all they’d suffered, even though they still loved each other deeply.”

Mulder swallowed.

“Is this my two weeks’ notice?”

Scully breathed a laugh and said, “Strange enough, I can’t foresee that happening. Can you?”

“Scully, when have you ever known me to respond appropriately to stimuli? I’m like a lab rat that wakes up in a maze and turns to the big guys above and says, ‘Hey, what’s all this about? I’m gonna miss the Knicks!’”

This scored another Scully laugh. He heard her settle further into bed. Mulder held the phone lightly against his ear, batted down a memory of the drugged whimper she’d made under the press of his thumb, the silky pillow of her chest. They’d been in pitch blackness both times, but he was a man of many senses and a faultless memory. Back in civilisation, all men and women came off garish and dressed up and shiny and impenetrable compared to how he’d gotten used to Scully out on the ice - freckled, sharp, arrestingly true .

“How do you know my mom’s number?” Scully asked him faintly. Her drowsiness was as familiar to him as her dry irony.

“On Sundays, we discuss your outfits of the week. How’d you pick up so quickly?”

“I thought you might call.”

“Right.” Stalemate. “I expected it to feel safer being back home. But it feels the same, only loud.”

“And too quiet,” she slurred. He was certain she was practically asleep, her fair little eyebrows raised in feigned consciousness. “No wind.”

“And an empty room,” he risked adding. She mumbled agreement.

“Mul’er,” she yawned gracelessly, “I’m just…I’m gonna leave you on, okay? You breathe and I’ll hang up when I’m asleep.”

Mulder considered pointing out the flaw in her logic. Then again, that was her job. Instead, never one to flout the doctor’s orders, he just breathed reliably.

Scully was out already; he recognised the steady, kitten-like huff of her breathing, having been close audience to it in recent weeks. Maybe things would be different. He was so close to honouring Samantha – so close he could hear the peal of her laughter in the other room, teasing him for being the only boy on the swim team to show up in a speedo. Then he’d have time to spend all the love Samantha alone had taught him how to hold and preserve, even if that consisted solely of keeping Scully well-fed and out of the line of fire. It was possible to love someone so much that you wished they’d never seen your damn face. It was possible to love someone so much that you wanted to attach them surgically to your lungs. All he knew was that, for now, Scully wasn’t going anywhere. He was certain only of needing her and having her by his side, of the soft rise and fall of her fitful weariness travelling over the phone. Two kid neighbours holding cans to their ears, a string pulled taut between their windows, the ocean sound of their furtive breathing that said, _There are bullies and vindictive teachers and neglectful parents and killer ghosts under the bed, and there’s the pact we made in the mud at our secret hide out, when you spat into my palm and I spat in yours, and we were young and helpless and had only each other to lose._

-

Officially, they were in deep shit. Or, officially, they were investigating deep shit. The FBI’s welcome home parade got lost in translation and came out as a parade of indignities: Skinner pulled out of their corner by the collar, little weasel Spender and cool friend Diana down in their basement with a trash can full of Morley packets, and daddy Kersh keeping them on a Kevlar child leash.

Mulder and Scully stalled. They immovably resisted an unstoppable force, returned to a baseline that was no longer at base. They were in the car, driving onwards, running out of West.

This was how: they wore Mulder-Scully’s clothes, made Mulder-Scully leaps of magic tied down by chains of hard logic, rendered Mulder-Scully messes of things, had the Mulder-Scully luck of stumbling into an X-File in the middle of a desert best known for the occasional tumbleweed, functioned within the Mulder-Scully rules of unspoken chastity. And inside the Mulder-Scully looking shapes were two odd imposters with the faint notion of having once lived these lives as their own.

-

Someone was playing _Kokomo_ over the hospital café loudspeaker. _Aruba, Jamaica, oh I wanna take ya. Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama._ Stepping out from the elevator, Scully stopped in her tracks as she heard it, then regained pace with renewed ferocity towards where Skinner was squeezed uncomfortably into a plastic chair like a wrestler sat on a playground swing. When he registered her approach, he sat up and pulled his cup of instant coffee to his chest. The fluorescents turned his head into a waxen dome.

“You hear this?” Scully asked, pointing vaguely to the ceiling. “The Marx Brothers’ idea of a joke, I presume. Hilarious.”

“The Gunmen went to ask the front desk about parking validation. You think-” Skinner glanced around, unsettled, “you think they put this on?”

Scully pressed her eyes closed, slumped down in the seat opposite him. There was a Styrofoam cup of something caffeinated sitting on the round metal table between them. He nodded for her to take it.

“Mulder lets them think they’re funny. I tell him it’s unhealthy to fuel delusion,” she sighed, waving a hand in the air. The thing in the cup was coffee adjacent and just hot enough to burn any taste-buds that might have further protested to it into a deceased crisp. Scully choked on a scalding sip, then added, “If Mulder’s still conscious, he’s probably chuckling away at this up in his room.”

“The Beach Boys are alright,” Skinner added edgily. He had the habit of speaking like he was afraid there were spies attempting to lip-read him at all times, kept his mouth a terse line and spat out minimal words, military ventriloquism.

Scully studied him in the empty cafeteria, an important large man in a suit, sipping away at instant coffee and keeping her company. She and Skinner shared a certain respect; it was not like the respect between her and Mulder, but more like the respect between two soldiers who agreed to sit together at the bar each night so they could drink in mutual silence. 

Amidst a procession of apologies he had delivered in curt, euphemistic sincerity over the years – sorry about your disappearance; sorry about your partner; sorry about your sister; sorry about your health; sorry about the girl in Arizona – Scully vaguely recalled returning an apology about his wife. He was either widowered or divorced. She guessed the former. It was difficult enough to keep track of all her own losses recently. For a while she had been a horse with blinders on, or like Patrick and Vicky Crump, possessed by a hum so searingly painful she could think only of moving forward to survive. Only since returning from Antarctica did she feel the respite of tolerable inertia begin to set in. Part of it was that she had almost nothing left to lose. Mostly she just wished to be left briefly alone.

Skinner understood. He was a solid, stand-up man with a temper fuelled by a desire to be good despite the cost. He towered over her without intimidating, only attempting to cast a shadow he felt worthy of her reciprocal respect, and she admired his anger, she relished his righteous frustration against the whack-a-mole system, she prodded it exactingly. He was stern and huge and perpetually constipated with reasonable vexation at her and Mulder’s escapades. 

In hospitals, he was changed entirely. Skinner had never shown up at her bedside once without a bouquet of tulips or daffodils during all of his brisk, abashed visitations during the worst of her cancer. And that night, he had paced restlessly outside Mulder’s room, face open with questioning when she had emerged from the nurse's bay with news of Mulder’s scans reporting the only thing wrong with him was his personality. 

Just then, he refused to meet her eye. She went first.

“Sir, can we both agree that-”

“Yes,” he cut her off immediately. Scully thought she might have to perform the Heimlich on him. “I understand what it’s like to be swept up in battle victory. Forget it.”

Scully searched his face. His skin was tough and smooth like genuine leather and the groove of his frown was strong. Glancing up at her momentarily, he gave a nod of assurance and the matter was settled. They both took a breath and settled into their seats.

“Mulder’s higher than Edmund Hillary ever dreamed of,” Scully said. “I’m going to stay overnight and keep and eye on him, make sure he doesn’t start rattling off government secrets to any nurse with a Betty Booper bust-line.”

“He seemed fine to me,” Skinner commented brusquely. He appeared to resent the implication that Mulder might require longer than expected to become conscious enough for a due kick in the ass. “Did he say something to you when you went back in?”

“He was acting like the recipient of God’s word. Honestly, if I woke up one day and Mulder claimed prophethood, I wouldn’t be surprised. But tonight’s revelation wasn't quite as revelatory as he seemed to believe. It’s the mood of compulsive confession that has me concerned.”

“You know, Agent Scully,” Skinner began, “I never have any idea what the hell you and Mulder are talking about. And frankly? That comes as a relief.”

Scully offered him a close-lipped laugh and he cracked an almost smile, eyes on her with subtle levity. 

“Mulder never told me what happened out on the ice,” he said after a beat, noting without prying.

“And I never got to thank you. I know you raised hell and put yourself on the line to save my life.”

He nodded down at his great stone hands, embarrassed by gratitude.

“In general, I prefer being the dealer of the cane than the ass on the receiving end, but your life is worth more than any official reprimand. No thanks is necessary.”

Her father would have liked him. Her father would have said, _That’s a man you can rely on. That’s a good man to make your own._ It occurred to Scully, not for the first time, that her father was the yardstick against which she measured all men and, most obsessively, herself. But Scully liked Skinner too much to allow room for her father’s approval. There was a gruff tenderness which he found deeply mortifying in himself. He was not a man who coveted power; it made him both an ideal leader and a man incapable of the ego required to ascend the dizzying heights. He was a friend playing commander, and eventually her father might have found his grit to be lacking, but she prized him for his private humility.

“Out on the ice,” she said, “we just kept each other alive. That was all.”

Skinner sat with this for a moment then donned a familiar pensive, veteran look.

“Whenever someone asks me how I survived Vietnam, I say, ‘Together, we kept ourselves alive.’ Mulder didn’t tell me what happened, but he said the same thing. ‘We kept each other alive.’ There’s a difference between you two and the men I relied on in the war. Seems like you’re both better at keeping each other alive than your own damn selves.”

“It makes us vulnerable,” Scully said, with a shrug.

“No, it makes you-” He stopped, appraising the alarm in her eyes at the prospect of his conclusion. ‘Or…no,” he amended. “I suppose there’s more than one way to be alone.’ 

-

In oscillatory physics, there is a notion of entrainment. Distinct organic rhythms, when kept in company, fall into synchrony. A battalion of troops once crossed a bridge marching in such profound simultaneity that the amplification of their footsteps brought the structure down. But if they had made it to the other side, any passers-by walking alongside the martial parade would have found it impossible to resist falling into harmony. Brainwaves entrain, heartbeats entrain, two people lying on each other’s chest – breaths entrain that way. Nothing can oppose the way the river flows.

Mulder and Scully said no.

A little fish grew legs and crawled out of the sea. A little fish took one look around at the harsh, uncharted terrain. A little fish turned and dove back in, preferring simply to drown.

-

On their first day back in the bull-pen, which Mulder nicknamed ‘child-care,’ Scully felt a shoe nudging at her shin under the table. Mulder had bribed his way across the room to be seated opposite her, which did wonders to exacerbate the laughing glances Scully attracted from whispering women in the FBI ladies’ rooms. She looked up to find him chewing on a pen and a bad idea.

“How do you like having your own desk?” he asked with an infuriating jump of his brows.

“Not as much as I like the idea of attending your funeral.”

“Hey, Scully,” he said, letting the Biro fall from between his teeth into his palms. He leaned forward conspiratorially, voice low, and his eyes were Cayman tropical green. “If I’d told you about my solo honeymoon to Bermuda in advance, would you have tagged along?”

Scully understood this to be a test, a toe dipped in the water. She dropped her chin, tried not to look too amused.

“You mean before or after I made sure you weren’t suffering a stroke?”

“No, seriously,” he said lightly, shrugging in request of Scully humouring him. “You're well aware that this nine to five is making me reconsider my stance on euthanasia. I just wanna know, if I happened to come across a piece of information vaguely resembling an X-File, would you rather be left blissfully unaware?” 

Scully caught the masked sobriety in his tone. She shook her head slightly, aware that there were eyes all around, judging them.

“When have I ever let you go alone?”

In his eyes, Benjamin Franklin was rediscovering electricity.

“Okay, Robin, I’m thinking of going on a little road trip,” he said, glancing around at the agents droning away in their vicinity. Scully felt an altogether inappropriate thrill at the covertness of their affair. He sided with Diana, chose her, perfected the in-your-face ditch, and showed up everyday looking to get them both fired as if that would aid their crusade. She was past expectation. And they hadn’t touched each other or been alone in so long. “If Kersch finds out, it'll give him a big hernia.”

“How big?” she inquired.

“Round about the size of Area 51.”

Scully moved a hand to cover her eyes, resisting laughter. After she had recovered, she set her gaze on Mulder and they locked in like lasers meeting at a burning halfway point.

“So,” she said, “your highway mix-tape or mine?” 

Papers rustled, people watched the clock, and Mulder blossomed freely with a trouble-making grin.


	16. Family Names

Startling awake to find herself in Casa Mulder with her rested head on his shoulder approximately one minute before the Scully family dawn roll call under the Christmas tree quickly put Scully in a state somewhere between molasses calm and pyrotechnic panic, evidently a condition which disposed her to ill-advised last-minute plus ones because by the time it dawned on her that Mulder’s accompaniment might cast her life choices in impossibly greater doubt before her family’s eyes, he was already jubilantly dabbing his special occasion musk oil on the insides of his wrists and under the curve of his jaw, eyes a-tinsel at the sight of his rueful partner emerging from the bathroom in a Sunday best ensemble she’d had the foresight of her own recent Mulder-associated recklessness to bring along.

“Dana Katherine? You haven’t seen my friend Scully around anywhere have you?” he said, proffering a pointedly ignored hand. “She’s about yea high – give or take five inch heels – looks and dresses like she’s been called to the witness stand?”

Scully made the first strike in a mental tally-book of Mulder murder impulses of the day. She was out of breath with stress, moving to share mirror space with him and primping her hair pointlessly. He plucked a lost strand off the shoulder of her sweater; she’d gone for a fitted deep-V, a sandy colour intended to lighten her inner appearance, paired with black pants and glossy pumps. Behind her, Mulder was in his best dark jeans and a maroon cable-knit. She watched the two of them in the mirror for a moment, his shorn hair and that all-year tan and the unshakeable warmth about him. He looked like her husband. 

“You know, Mulder,” she said, spinning to face him in a gust of despair, “you don’t have to come. Family gatherings can be trying at best and, in any case, I know this isn’t your scene.”

He smiled and she realised she had been grimacing transparently.

“Who doesn’t love Christmas, Scully?”

“You’re Jewish.”

Mulder wiggled his eyebrows.

“Yeah, but kissing under the mistletoe is red-blooded American.”

Scully touched the cross at her neck in a moment of religious fervour as he steered her towards the front door.

*

Bill tolerated Mulder with the same forced tact that a cop with a gun pointed at him under the table welcomed the mafia to his daughter’s wedding.

“Better late than never,” he greeted them. A smile that inspired aspirin. He led them through his mother’s home towards the living room where Scully teetered blind behind an over-compensatory mountain of gifts. Mulder had a guiding hand tethered inconspicuously to her back, having been refused the privilege of carrying any gifts himself. They were Scully’s quasi-apology. He’d have to purchase his own. She off-loaded under the tree then followed Bill’s condemning taciturnity out to the garden, steeling herself with Mulder slotted dependably by her side.

Every step towards the back door was a step back one month in the past towards a year ago, a Christmas she had spent avoiding brotherly accusations of desolation, maternal pity, cold-calling Mulder, playing his part in front of a dark-haired replacement, losing something she hadn’t known she was allowed to have, embarrassed and ashamed at a funeral, weeping eulogies over a hoax, and she was glad, she was so relieved that Mulder was with her this time, that he had barnacled himself to her silent anguish, that he was giving her elbow a reassuring pinch as they neared the screen door.

Did he know? Was that why he was making excuses to waste Christmas Eve with her, to accompany her to a house full of people who would have preferred not hearing his name again until it was being read from the obituaries? Maybe he remembered everything, maybe nothing. But who could ever forget? Surely he knew. That little girl would have been his daughter too.

They stepped out into the morning sunlight. Scully froze on the deck.

There were children all over the yard. Three elementary school aged kids were gorging iced shortbreads over at the overflowing table of seasonally shaped sweets, playing chubby bunny with a choking hazard’s abundance of peppermints. Two younger children – a boy with a shock of platinum silky hair and a dark eyed girl in overall’s around Emily’s age – were poorly obscured behind her mother’s bare ornamental pear tree, concocting what appeared to be a dirt-and-grass magic potion in an pilfered china bowl. There was a preteen girl re-lacing her muddy Converse and, in doing so, exposing the hem of her Piccadilly yellow Christmas dress to the same mud which had graced the soles of her shoes. And all around, a few paired adults she hadn’t the presence of mind to recognise were divided between damage control, harmless child negligence, and fawning over the cherubic nephew perched upon Bill’s hip and the flushed baby girl cradled beatifically in Tara’s arms.

Scully swayed backwards. Mulder bumped into her like a blimp into a mountain, catching her arm. Maggie spotted them and approached with haste, pulling Scully into a hurried, subtly shielding embrace.

“Dana, sweetheart,” she whispered urgently, pulling back with a cover of a smile. She included Mulder in her address as though he were Scully’s spouse or guardian. To his credit, he stood beside her, solid but unanswering, waiting for Scully’s reaction. “Bill and Tara invited a few friends at the last minute. I tried to call you, I couldn’t get through. I’m sorry, I know, I-”

“It’s fine, Mom.”

Scully spread her lips unconvincingly, but it was enough. Maggie nodded little supportive nods. She scoured her daughter’s face and Scully focused on her mother’s pearl earrings. Sometimes being loved and comforted was like reliving the stark absence of those two things.

Maggie turned to Mulder then and Scully noted an undertone of plea in her expression as she opened her arms to her semi-orphaned adoptive son. He stooped modestly to a receive her.

“Fox, what a lovely surprise.” Against all odds, she meant it. Her mother loved Mulder in a way that was not quite equal to approval but which was coloured enough by a sort of foster-mother charitable sternness that it resulted in his position as a prized wayward son.

“I know I come empty-handed, but we were running late and Little Miss Punctual here had a gun on me from the passenger seat,” Mulder said with a bashful chuckle. His humility made Scully want to weep on that day. She tucked herself into his side.

“Never mind that,” Maggie dismissed him. “I’ll put you on clean up duty instead.” Her expression was warm but she was serious. The woman ran a tight ship, if compassionately. She threw Dana one last uncertain glance. By then, Scully had gone inside herself and was more or less safe. The sword of her grief had been sheathed.

“I’ll be back down in a second,” she said to the outdoor floorboards. “I just have to…” and she motioned to her coat, trailing off, turning back into the relative darkness of the empty kitchen and waiting for the soft fall of Mulder’s footsteps behind her before she headed for the stairs.

*

“I expected more half-naked David Bowie posters.”

Mulder hovered by the doorway of her teenage bedroom, shifting from foot to foot and daring only to stick his head in. At the look of disapproval she shot his way, he seemed to gain confidence and approached where she sat spacily on the bed.

“More of a Sydney Poitier kinda gal?” he tried. Scully examined her hands and gave a tired huff of a laugh. “Harrison Ford? Springsteen? Omar Sharif?”

“I got very into The Clash my senior year,” she admitted, giving the dog a bone. He plopped himself on the mattress beside her, sending her bouncing into the air deliberately. She nudged him in payback, keeping her smile trained on the plain carpet floor. “I never decorated my room in that way, for other people to see. The most scandalous print I ever had was the _Vitruvian Man_ ,” she said, standing after a moment to walk around.

Her walls were bare, painted grey-blue. Her closet doors were white, her bedcovers too, and her pillows were standard issue. The dresser, at least, was an ornate mahogany antique adorned in framed photographs and an academic certificate or two. All her other ornaments, books, wall art and knick-knacks, she’d taken to her Georgetown apartment.

“My father was a military man,” she continued, by way of explanation. “He believed in making your bed a certain way, placing your shoes a certain way by the door. Only Melissa had the gall to, you know, drape tie-die over the headboard, hang up dreamcatchers and star charts and posters of Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell. Her vanity was bedecked in crystals of various forms and my father used to say, ‘Is this my daughter’s bedroom or a reptile terrarium?’”

Mulder laughed, an easy audience. Scully considered him for a moment. 

“All my decor was hidden,” she said, deciding to let him in. She opened her closet and lifted the mirror hanging on the inside of the door to reveal a collage of polaroid photographs. Mulder was beside her in a moment, poring over the secret treasure trove with an expression usually reserved for photo evidence of green-blooded things. One polaroid was of frog skeleton by a lake. One of a golden-skinned boy in a bolo tie with his lips attached to her cheek. There was one of her standing in the fork of a tree, her arms and legs balanced wide, triumphant. There was one she had taken of herself blowing a smoke ring on a porch at midnight. One where she was tormenting Charlie with a desiccated snake sin. And one of her on her bed, hair splayed out beneath her, smiling for a cheap compliment and a lusty young photographer.

Mulder touched the photographs with reverent delicacy.

“You look happy,” he said quietly. “A little devious.”

“I was bored,” she told him. “I tried getting into trouble. I did things I didn’t like. I studied. But I remember being bored for most of my life.”

What she was not saying was that it was he who had delivered her from a life of feeling wholly untouched. He absorbed the fact in silence.

In the top right corner, there was an over-exposed close-up of herself and Melissa. Scully reached to unpin it. She was laughing, her face hidden in her sister’s long arm, and Missy was gesturing, smiling, in the middle of some outrageous story embellished for dramatic effect. She had on her favourite choker, one with a topaz pendant Scully had unearthed and polished and presented to her with the precocious thirteen-year-old disclaimer that she didn’t believe in birthstone meanings. It was all a past life.

Behind her, Mulder’s presence her was unintrusive. Scully tilted her head so he could see it better, ran the pad of her thumb over their matching smiles. The thrum of his observation rolled off like a hearth. Maybe another time she’d show him the tarot cards she’d kept hidden for Missy under the bed.

“I only met your sister a couple of times, but she had my immediate admiration.” Mulder reached around to hold the photo, his hand over her hand. “Well, not immediate. At first, she got on my nerves. Must be a Scully girl thing. Then she kinda scared me. She had zen by the nose hairs. Most militant hippie I ever met and I loved it, I loved how different the two of you were. Suddenly I saw how you’d put up with me for so long.”

They both laughed, heads lowered unhappily. He raised his other hand to rub Scully’s shoulder and she had to move away before the rising weight in her throat broke open too wide. Maybe they’d lost equivalent lives.

“That’s Missy,” she said over by the window. The curtains were closed. She sniffed, swiped her eyes. “Blazing across the country in furious pursuit of her inner peace.”

“Did she like me?” 

Scully turned to find him replacing her mirror carefully and closing the closet door.

“Far too much.”

“Based on what you told her.”

“Based on what I told her, she loved you. Then after she met you…When I woke up in that hospital, she was sitting beside me, praying I think, supplicating to the spirit world. Who knows. The first thing I registered was her kissing my face, saying, ‘He came to you didn’t he? I knew it would work.’ Later, I figured she must have been referring to you.”

Mulder lowered his gaze humbly.

“When I could string a few words together, she told me all about you as though we’d never met, said you had a ‘powerful lightness’ in you and a heaviness that was – well, she called it like mine, to which I responded, barely conscious mind you, that her supposed insights made it seem like heaviness was the opposite of lightness, when she had previously referred to the dichotomy of souls as light and darkness.”

“Look at you, Milan Kundera on an elephant’s dose of analgesics.”

“Very much so. But Melissa just said, _‘There are no opposites, Dana. Only a circle that leads back into itself at the same instant that it leads away.’_ I think she took comfort in that idea. I found it horrifying.”

Mulder’s eyes flashed as he made the connection between a throwaway confession and a fading tattoo. She should have known the psychologist in him would have made note of it.

Scully turned away from him again, ventured a parting of her curtains and a look down at the party below. The guests were making their way through a late breakfast on a colonial set of white wooden chairs while the children were sprawled on the grass. Tara was still cradling the newest addition to the family. Scully closed her eyes for a moment. She wouldn’t dare touch the baby in front of Mulder.

It occurred to her that Missy wouldn’t have allowed this shock to happen. She would have found some way to warn her, camped out on the front porch until Scully arrived. She would have flown at Bill for his insensitivity which was no doubt a result of some warped sense of familial chivalry. Maybe he too was making a misled attempt at compensating. The Scullies were limping along. No Charlie, no Melissa, only half a Dana left. Scully brought gifts and Fox Mulder FBI, and Bill brought a few normal people. Missy would have understood his side too. God, and if she had been there last year when they’d found Emily…

“Not to have a one track mind,” Mulder said, “but all the mistletoe is downstairs.”

He had his hands shoved deep in his pockets and was eyeing her tentatively. Scully smiled with her eyes closed and joined him, walking with him into the hall.

“Just so we’re clear,” she said, “I respect the mistletoe rules. But if you trap me under a sprig in front of my brother, I can’t promise I’ll make much of an effort to resuscitate you.”

Mulder breathed a laugh and threw a relieved arm briefly over her shoulders.

Downstairs, Bill was awaiting their return. Scully saw him alight upon her with poorly-hidden excitement as soon as they walked through the door, and sure enough, he waved to someone out of sight, hopping up from his seat to meet her and Mulder on the deck.

“Hey, uh, Fox, you want to go make yourself a plate?” Bill said to Mulder, eyeing him with thinly-pulled politeness. Mulder got the message and threw Scully a furrowed, questioning look. She braced herself and nodded reassurance, so Mulder gave Bill a unintentionally inflammatory salute and made himself scarce, heading over to the sweets table by the children on the grass.

“Dana, you remember Richard,” Bill said in a low, animated voice as a man who, for all intents and purposes, resembled a Puerto Rican cowboy in a smart bolo tie stepped into view. He was a heftier than she remembered and his new muscle bulk was softened by a healthy adiposity unfamiliar to the memory of the skin-and-bones teenage boy she had known at sixteen - but the eyes, the black treacle eyes were the same. 

“Bolo?!” Scully threw her arms around him without thinking, swept up by an ancient instinct and he encircled her with lung-clearing force. Over Bolo’s shoulder, she caught Mulder blank eyes. She disentangled herself from her old friend and tried not to resent Bill’s winner grin.

“I’ll let you two catch up,” he said with too much hope, and skipped off, leaving Scully alone with a man she had not seen in over ten years, save for briefly at Melissa’s burial. Bolo said nothing yet, only poured his gaze over her with familiar wordless attentiveness, his eyes smiling and his breathing deep in exultation.

“Come, I’ll get you a glass of cold water from inside,” she said, remembering what it took to get him talking. He only smiled in private.

As soon as they stepped away from seeing eyes, he said, “Where’re your freckles, Annie Warbucks?” She turned to him in question and he pinched her bare cheek.

It was so strange to be smiling with him. He was the same, so quiet around adults that her father never suspected he was a threat to his daughters’ decencies. Scully remembered Bill complaining about Bolo spending so much time in Melissa’s room with the door closed. _It’s just Bolo_ , her mother had said. “Just Bolo” gave Scully her first taste of a young man’s lips behind the old maple in the backyard after dark and said, “Now I can say I’ve kissed a Great Dane.” When Melissa found out, she threatened to cut off his hair in his sleep. It was all in good fun. No one outside of their trio would have understood.

“S-s’been a while,” Bolo said, leaning back against the kitchen island as Scully fetched him a glass. He still had a little stutter, then, something he’d picked up during his time as a serial foster kid, along with that cowboy accent. Melissa used to say, _He’s been through the system._ He was her noble cause. A long-haired orphan with those great big brown eyes and lashes like a poor baby cow. The vegetarian in her leapt to his constant defence like a tree-hugger chained to a trunk.

“I heard s-somethin’ awful happened to you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah s-somethin’ called a Mulder.”

It was a deliberate jab. She faced him. Beneath the shadow goatee and the softened cheeks and the handsome boldness of his dark brow and his attractive broadness, there was the same old Bolo - a little dirty, a little blunt, but deeply, gently decent. The provocations were another thing he’d picked up on his trip “through the system.”

“You’re still mean,” she said finally. Bolo held her gaze as she handed him a poured glass, absorbing.

“Are we any different to how we were before?” There was a bandit smile in his eyes. Scully folded her arms.

“Why are you here, Richard?”

“Can’t we stick to Bolo?”

Two masters of deflection. They had a momentary stare-down, then Bolo placed his unsipped cup on the table and moved to join her by the sink. He leaned forward on his elbows to look out the window and Scully did the same after surmising his intentions were, as usual, mostly harmless.

Beyond the glass, the children were harassing Mulder. He made a good climbing tree for the smaller ones, and the older few were engaging him in a rabid game of ‘But why?’. Somehow they’d gotten onto the topic of pagan flower rituals.

“Kids,” said Bolo. “After what I been through, I ain’t ever having any.”

“Oh my god,” Scully said and she buried her head in her hands. Bolo straightened up in defence and began laughing apologetically.

“S-sorry, that wasn’t my greatest s-segue. Bill tol’ me I should work it into the conversation, I…” He bent down, seeking her eye. “C’mon now. You know I’m hopeless with tact.”

When she could bear it, Scully lifted her face from her hands and tried her best not to look furious.

“Nobody in this family can keep a damn secret,” she said, shaking her head and blinking rapidly. “He has no right-!”

“Melissa never woulda tol’ me,” Bolo said, stopping her. He spoke always like he was chewing tobacco. Scully assessed him anew. He looked askance from her appraisal and surveyed the scene out the window with renewed interest.

“No,” she agreed. Bolo nodded.

“And you too,” he said. “You could keep quiet too. I know you thought me’n Missy was sleepin’ together back in high school.”

“Weren’t you?” Bolo shook his head, which came as a revelation. “So what were you two doing all that time in her room?”

Bolo shrugged, looking out the window.

“Talkin’. Havin’ a friend.” 

So, something more intimate. Scully let it sink in, reframing her teenage insecurities. In the interval, hush and memory settled the closing distance between them, wrought so long apart by the years. Then they were just two misfit, brusque teens, hiding from the adult party.

“God, I miss her,” Bolo muttered rigidly. “I can’t s-say…Better to s-say nothin’ than to make a thing cheap by not s-sayin’ it well enough.”

The early winter light lapped at the gold in his skin and for a moment, lost in thought, he looked like his old self. Scully knew what it looked like to be ruined in love.

“Did she know?”

“Know what?” he asked her sharply, but one glance at Scully cracked the façade. His expression crumpled and he looked away for a long time, silent.

“I never tol’ ‘er,” he admitted softly, at last. “Damn witch figured out her own self. She must’a read it in my palm or s-something. One day, outta the blue, she s-said, ‘Richard, I need you to know: I love you. I always will. I never loved anybody ever like this. And I s-swear to you on my own grave, I’d marry you if I just could.’ I s-spent- hell, I spent the last ten years mullin’ over that line. I thought maybe she’d gone to some psy-psy-psy- dammit - fortune teller, got ‘er cards read and our auras didn’t match or s-some voodoo bullshit, or maybe her parents just didn’t want no Puerto Rican in-law. Then I realised maybe she was…’c-cept I’d always figured, if it were any S-Scully kid, it’d be you.” Scully watched him with a long-ago panic. He read her expression and looked away thoughtfully. “Though I guess there ain’t no family quota on these things.”

“Please,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”

“Fuck you. Never.”

His offence was reassuring.

Scully let out a tense breath. It was a lot, no less because she had never heard Bolo speak for so long uninterrupted. He was a man of verbal economy. But it was all the secrets too, all the fear of getting found out, even now.

“It’s been a long time,” she echoed. Bolo understood her meaning and received it solemnly.

“S-Some people…a long time don’t cut it. A lifetime don’t cut it. Wadn’t her fault. Never anybody’s fault. S-S’why I never said. You don’t jus’ put that shit on s-someone. S-Some people take a little more from your life than jus’ love, and you either get damn lucky or you learn to keep livin’ without.”

Scully stiffened, catching his attention.

“Is that what this is?” she asked, shooting straight. “A compromise? Is that how old we are? You get the closest thing to Melissa and I get a man who doesn’t care that I come batteries not included?”

“I’m past meetin’ people, Dana,” he said, with painful sincerity. “I met everyone I’m ever gonna meet. But you and I, we got s-somethin’ you can’t find nowhere else - we got the past. That’s proof - that we been happy, innocent once. That’s the truth. And I love you in that long ol’ way that dudn’t need much and isn’t gonna waver. Isn’t that better than being alone?”

Scully levelled him. Loneliness upon loneliness. She was easily convinced that she was an aberrant mode of design. But she knew by now who she was and what she’d chosen, the way she never could have known all those years ago when they were both kids.

“Some things are bigger than happiness,” she told him.

He eyed her appreciatively.

“Well, fuck.”

“You’ve got a dirtier mouth now, Bolo.”

“I’m addicted to s-soap.”

“It helps with your stutter doesn’t it?”

“Me an’ my fuckin’ stutter.” Bolo shook his head. “Missy liked it. She s-said it was like tap dancin’ with words.” Suddenly, his face fell and collapsed into tears. His whole frame shook and he hid behind the palm of his hand. “Goddammit. S-sorry,” he said thickly as Scully fumbled for an appropriate response. She had a hand on his giant arm and was using the other to reach for a tissue. “I never tol’ anyone. I never tol’ anyone before you.”

“It’s okay,” she said, frowning down her own grief. 

“You know, we were together a couple times after high s-school, but it was nothin’, I know that. That year she disappeared a little, few years back, she came down s-south to visit me. She was s-so lost, I don’t know if you knew. It was then. The way two friends can be together when they’re alone in a s-strange place and it don’t matter what kinda love you both want on most days. You’re layin down and feels good to help each other that way. You need it.” Yes. She knew that feeling well. She had known it more than once out on the ice. Bolo turned to Scully with desperation shielded by thin satire. “Why’nt I jus’ go for you all those years ago? Woulda s-saved us both from heartache.”

“Well, you were older and intimidating, a little mean.” She gave him a doctor’s sad smile. “So, naturally, I liked you too much to sleep with you.”

Bolo laughed miserably.

“Daddy’s little girl,” he said, recovering his irony. He swiped his sleeve over his face and straightened up, touching up his shiny bolo. “I’m s-sorry ‘bout this. Merry Christmas, Annie.”

Those huge dark eyes shone down at her, brimming with decades of old love. His wet lashes, more beautiful than a girl’s, the concrete softness of him, his golden-skinned warmth, and his crooked cowboy smile, washed over by the old Western blues. He had made her a lifetime’s offer. Instead, she settled for one last embrace.

“Merry Christmas, Bolo,” she told him, and tapped his chest as she wrenched herself away. 

“We should head back,” he said, sniffling. “I gotta tell Bill I failed to bed his little s-sister.”

Scully offered him a weary smile, and as they left the kitchen, having lost more water than they’d consumed, she thought helplessly of her own life’s half-love. She thought of the blind weight of him in Antarctica, shaking after he was spent, stuck to her skin and crushing her into the ground. She thought of the way he’d stroked his thumb mindlessly over the steering wheel as he’d driven her to her mother’s house that morning, the way the motion made her tongue feel heavy and she’d had to look out the window. It was exhausting to be next to someone, wanting them so much all the time. So long – it had been years in retrospect. And she knew deep down like Bolo that she could go on forever.

When they re-emerged into the garden, the children were running, dancing in a festive circle around a supine offering, throwing ceremoniously the petals of flowers scavenged in glee. As Scully soaked the scene in, she saw an image fleeting between the prancing legs of children like a picture carousel: Mulder there, in the centre of their joy. He was lain down in the grass, his body liquid and gold on a bed of living green, eyes closed, serene. From above rained down a languid showering of petals, falling lightly over him like a ritual of dreams. His breath was slow, a stretched out peace, the meditation of his lips, the lightness of his hand resting on his chest, his other outstretched by his side. Each petal fluttered down to him, lilac, miniature, white, perfumed, settling with an airy curl. In the slowing down of time, he looked like he was dying. The mystic bliss, the nuptial, elegiac calm, was a beauty much like grief. Scully’s chest was heavy. An idea took root fatally. There was one wish more powerful than wanting a child for herself. In an otherworldly coolness, Mulder lifted his lids and his eyes settled on her. She could not expect to recover.

-

Mulder was engaged in a mental fist fight with his evil twin. Good, sensitive, kind Mulder said, _Leave her alone. It’s New Year’s Eve. Normal life doesn’t include watching the ball drop with Snow White and the three little dwarves._ Evil Mulder said, _Call her right now._

In his spare time he researched demon possession. In his spare time he researched parabamastabatory egocentricism and mommy issues to boot. All he found was a DSM-5 entry with a picture of his face next to it and a subheading that read, _related terms: Scully_. Maybe they were best friends. Maybe they were cell mates. Maybe he was already holding the phone to his ear and dialling her number out of evil instinct.

*

“Hey look, Santa left one of his elves behind.”

Frohike growled and pointed a pizza cutter in the direction of Mulder’s jugular.

“You’re gonna leave your front teeth behind, BFG.” He pivoted to Scully and swept his arm wide to welcome her into the den. “Lovely to see you little lady, as always.”

Mulder shoved Frohike as he followed Scully in, his other hand grazing her back out of habit.

“You wearing a hair net Frohike?” Mulder asked. The grizzly doorman to the Emerald City re-fastened all six of his locks.

“I’ll spit in your food.”

“What’s that incredible smell?” Scully had her kitten nose pointed up in the air. Frohike opened his mouth to answer as an explosive pop sounded from somewhere in another crevice of their underground lair and he shot off in a panic, hollering about setting Langly and his goddamn microbes on fire if he did anything to jeopardise dinner. 

Mulder and Scully found themselves left unattended at what could be considered the entrance. The burrow was just as anaerobic and dark-room adjacent as ever, but there had been a clearly panicked effort to clear a corner of the room to make space for a dining table. They squeezed through the maze of displaced Manila file stacks, Led Zeppelin posters, and exposed-wire motherboards.

“You shoulda heard the way they panicked when I called to let them know I was picking you up.”

“Oh, Mulder, I wish you hadn’t. I’m not even going to eat much.”

“Well, you should. And they haven’t entertained any eligible young women in this place possibly ever. Let the peacocks fan their feathers.”

“When’s the last time you entertained an eligible young woman, Casanova?”

Mulder scoffed but didn’t answer.

They arrived at the empty table. Someone had placed an arrangement of candles in the centre and a remastered Dean Martin rendition of _Volare_ was playing over obscured speakers. Scully glanced at Mulder uncertainly. He took her coat and hung it over the back of her chair, shrugging for her to sit down. Then they both sighed in wait and looked around at the dragon’s cave like kids arriving early at a party.

The invitation had partially been a quid pro quo for her Christmas plus one, but it was also a blanket olive branch. She hadn’t called him over the holiday break so he assumed he’d done something wrong at Mrs Scully’s. Scully was impossible to apologise to because she never admitted to being upset. 

But then she had been different for longer than that. Ever since they’d returned from the ice. They had made it back home and all the anger he had seen in her over there turned inwards, went silent, and he couldn’t tell where it had gone. Perhaps she was waiting, watching, like a baby snake prepared to spend all its venom at once, like a bee prepared to kill itself if threatened just to fight back, just to protect the rest of its hive.

Or perhaps she knew he remembered the way she had pressed her face into his neck as she’d shuddered bluntly below him that first time, as though she hadn’t wanted him to see. Perhaps she knew that late at night on his couch, the pitch blackness behind his eyelids brought back the vacuum of light from the hut, the way she had held her breath over him the next time, bracing herself for release that came like tearing off gauze or being let down from a noose.

Perhaps he had used her too. Perhaps he had been given something of her which he did not know how to give back. They were both embarrassed - her by his possession, and him by his ignorance as to what it was that he possessed. 

Scully cleared her throat after a few minutes of empty silence.

“I didn’t even know they had a kitchen,” she said pointlessly.

At that moment, all three musketeers erupted into the room at once from an unseen creature flap and with them, a steaming rush of Italian delicacies balanced on trays held ostentatiously above their carefully poised heads. Byers was in a black tie, Frohike had on a waistcoat and an argyle bowtie, and Langly wore a black t-shirt with a white tuxedo print stencilled on. With a flourish and a signal nod from Byers, they each spun and lowered the dishes to the table with one arm folded neatly behind their backs. There was pesto pasta with a snowy dusting of parmesan, chicken cacciatore in a skillet drizzled in olive oil, assorted giardiniera, rosemary and salt grissini, kalamata olives, iced Chinotto in sweating glasses, and – the main event – margherita pizzas so fresh out of the oven that the buffalo mozzarella was still bubbling. They sat themselves down on the table with proud anticipation and Langly clapped twice loudly in the air, kicking a hidden projector into life so that live footage of the Times Square Ball flooded the cleared wall to the right. Just in time, _Volare_ came to a sweeping crescendo.

Scully applauded, breaking out into a genuine grin. She and Mulder were beside themselves with disbelieving laughter and he was rapt by the smile on her face. He realised then what he had not been able to name. All the times he had kissed her, the times they had slept together out on the ice – he had not once succeeded in making her laugh. He watched her then and her joy was like drinking champagne.

Mulder turned his gratitude on the Gunmen. He rewarded them with a jab. “You boys practised that.”

“This is incredible, guys,” Scully praised. They lapped it up.

“Langly made the pickled vegetables himself,” Byers piped in with a modest smile and a hint of exertion breathlessness.

Langly dropped his face bashfully. Fixing his glasses, he added, “That huge pop you guys probably heard when you came in was me unscrewing the lid on these bad boys and underestimating the fermentation pressure build up.”

“Nearly bullseyed all these glasses of specially procured Chinotto,” Frohike grumbled.

“I ordered the drink straight from Italy,” nodded Langly. “Found a deal on the dark web.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re perusing,” Frohike said, “but it’s not the dark web. More like the slightly dim web.”

“You’re slightly dim.”

“Gentlemen,” Byers mediated. He turned to the two special guests. “Shall we dig in?” And they did.

They dined, they argued, they watched the countdown to the New Year, and Scully laughed a real laugh another two times. It was the most normal Mulder had felt since Samantha. That’s how long he had gone on that way, half-human, the lifelong sensation that the rediscovery of his sister was a train hurtling towards him where he lay bound and gagged on the tracks, whistle screaming and engine so furiously engaged that steam and smoke and the grunts and sweats of the coal men inside the engine room all flew towards him with an intent to kill, funnelling themselves into his ears and eyes, and then - the suspicion which came to him some nights as a dream and other times as an arresting preoccupation in the middle of the day - the moment the train hit him, it would dissolve harmlessly into a puff of mist, shrouding over and around his cowering, braced body with foggy surreality and a soft sound like a woman letting out the weightiest sigh. Somewhere, there was a calendar with a red ‘X’ marked over the day. The months flipped and fluttered to the ground with a steady certainty and he was left always completely in the dark. And yet the day approached, the train screamed down the track, the moment crested like fire. Whether the dissipation of horror would be a nightmare of disbelief and underwhelm or otherwise a piercing relief unlike anything else, he could not tell. Occasionally, he awoke from the dream panting. Occasionally, calm. Always to a world where Samantha was nowhere to be found.

But that night he got a taste of some semblance of normality he could learn to grow attached to. Not now, not for a while. After he found his sister…maybe then he could rest. Maybe then he and Scully could stick their heads out the car windows even if they couldn’t fully, wholly get out. Was this what she wanted? She was warm and drunk on nothing and leaning her full body against his side like it was.

Fifteen minutes from T-time, Byers made an offhand comment that fireworks were noise pollution cover for experimental weapons testing. Langly jumped on that to add that New Years’ resolutions were just another grabby hand of the American Dream commercial draw, masked as self-improvement. 

Scully rolled her eyes and tipped back the remnants of her Chinotto.

“All a ploy to increase gym membership revenues,” she said drily.

“Well, isn’t it?” Mulder prodded, heaping more pasta onto her plate. She tried to push his wrist away but he insisted. He’d been noticing the way she’d eat whole salads and leave only the croutons and dressing, how she’d stopped taking her coffees with milk and sugar. Scully forked the serving reluctantly and he watched her eat, making sure it went down.

“It’s human nature to desire gathering and celebrating. Not everything loved and traditional is some arm of The Conspiracy.”

“Not inherently, but it’s like a kind of Murphy’s Law. Anything that can be used by the powerful to perpetuate gain and conveniently obfuscatate, will be.”

“Mulder’s Law,” supplied a helpful Langly. 

“I’ve got twenty on Scully winning,” said Frohike.

In unison, Byers and Langly said, “Twenty on Mulder.”

“There’s no argument here to win!” Scully threw her hands up, but her eyes were lit up with love of the fight. “Yes, we are being constantly manipulated and, yes, every little thing has been optimised for profitable gain – from New Year’s Eve souvenirs to the gender of an unborn child. Even counterculture has been commercialised. Evil exists, our time is short and the end comes unexpectedly et cetera, but God! don’t you guys ever get tired of not enjoying anything? Sometimes you just…have to get on with your life, despite everything.”

That shut them up.

A few seconds later, Frohike whispered, “Fifty on Scully.” Mulder flipped him the facial expression equivalent of the bird.

“I agree,” he rejoined eventually, conscious of the money riding on him. “How much have all of us here given up for the world you describe? Surely it’s a world we all consider worth saving.”

Scully was really looking at him now, an almost beseeching look in her eye, as though she wanted to ask him something but had been banned from saying the words and so was trying, hard as she could, to help him guess at the thing.

“That’s it, Mulder,” she said. “I don’t know if I believe in saving the world anymore - I don’t think that even means anything. I’m talking about the now. Maybe we set our sights on these lofty, impossible goals because it’s easier than giving what’s right in front of us due attention. It’s the most noble cop-out. Saving the world, rejecting all joy because it’s tainted by some obscure dark force that owns everything.”

“No, I know. Look around, Scully. There are things that only we own. Friends, found family, a well-cooked meal, a shoddy projector, a kiss at midnight. We’re here tonight, aren’t we? Honouring all of those things.”

Scully took it in. She nodded finally.

“Yes. Then we agree.”

Langly broke in after a tense moment: “Wait, so…who won?”

“Neither of us ever wins."

“But I’m usually right,” said Mulder.

“That’s not the same as winning,” she rebutted.

“Touché, partner.”

Scully smiled down at her unfinished plate and all was tentatively okay. Frohike slammed his cash down on the table and slumped his cheek on his fist, muttering under his breath.

Dessert came out at five minutes before the ball-drop – decadent sticky date pudding with ice cream courtesy of resident caramel sauce afficionado, John Fitzgerald Byers. They chatted amongst themselves and someone made a comment that Mulder and Scully should have paid more attention to Scooby Doo cartoons as kids, to which Mulder replied that he didn’t remember the gang ever unmasking a pile of radioactive salt or billion-year-old black oil. Someone noted that the word ‘assassin’ had sober connotations and yet it contained the word ‘ass’ in it twice, which made Scully snort and choke on her drink. She dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

“Love you guys,” she said with no secret of irony. 

Mulder leaned in to whisper, “Who’s included in ‘you guys’?” earning an elbow in the side. The barest vestige of decorum kept him from giving the tip of her nose a quick nip. 

All the while, the big moment crept up on them. In the final minute, they all counted along. Mulder thought of Scully, how she had attached herself to him at the Christmas party, sitting close the way she was now, even after her brief kitchen sojourn with the cowboy cliché she then avoided for the rest of the day. He thought of the train approaching him on the tracks, of Samantha, of one day being freed. He thought of the way Scully stiffened against his arm as the seconds petered away and how he could not tell her fear from her anticipation.

The ball dropped. He panicked. He pulled Langly’s face towards him with two hands and planted a bona fide smooch smack dab on the pretty man’s lips.

Langly went still and blinked as Mulder pulled away. Byers looked slightly miffed and Frohike snickered heartily. And Scully – miracle of miracles – she laughed along too as another arbitrary marker of lost time ticked over into the past and a kind of family sat together through the night and raised their glasses to a hopeful new year.


	17. Living, Dying, Deciding

In medical school, the worst ways to die were annotated in a textbook. Students catalogued their fears, studied them, passed exams on the horrors of having a body. Ask any layman, any Joe Blow, any leg-warmer ambassador with an Ab Roller and health insurance: Terminal cancer or dementia? Blindness or Alzheimer’s? Parkinson’s or Lewy body disease? Any one of Auden’s unknown citizens would say easily: What’s a little fogginess? What’s a mind swipe? 

Ask any doctor: _cancer, sudden death, no doubt about it._ Forgetting was worse than a grave. A terminal venture of cupping sand in one’s hands. Every grain sifted through, and empty hands were left cupping what then? Nothing anyone could recall.

Scully was trailing behind Dr Waterson on a cardiac ward round at the crack of dawn. He peppered the other two academic jock male students with easy questions, made dismissive remarks to the bird-like intern who kept gawkily craning his peckish head around Waterson’s shoulder to catch a glimpse of whatever cachectic soul was wasting away in bed 48. And he ignored Scully pointedly. Occasionally he would make a small gesture with his hand, knowing she was perched watchfully behind him, and she would interpret the order with haste, slip off, return swiftly and silently with a cuff, a syringe, an alcohol swab, and draw bloods while listening to Waterson dictate progress notes on the buffed linoleum outside. 

“My mother was a nurse too,” said the body attached to the median cubital vein she was draining.

“I’m not a nurse.”

“Oh. Yes, I thought you were a bit young.”

“No, I’m-,” Scully cut herself off, resigning to the good intentions of milky blue eyes and an ocean of wrinkles sagging in around old-school senility. She smiled curtly, placed an adhesive over a cotton ball. “Keep pressure on that.” 

She labelled the tube as she re-joined Waterson and his posse by the nurse’s bay. Under the low-wattage flicker, his hair was overcast and perfectly in place. He registered her with an offhand glance. On the X-ray viewer, he had pinned up a coronal CT of the living skeleton in bed 43. There was marked cerebral atrophy, diffuse leukoaraiosis. Waterson detailed a history of uncontrolled hypertension and poorly treated atherosclerosis, but no significant cardiac or coronary events, no infarct or previous hospitalisations, and yet a steep gradual decline in cognition, judgement, fine motor skills, notable mood fluctuations, profound confabulation.

“Transient ischaemic attacks?” said frat-nerd number one.

Waterson took a stiff breath. “Parker, do you know me to be a man who indulges in trick questions? I said no infarcts.”

He turned his gaze on frat-nerd number two.

“…Senility?”

Waterson laughed, high and clear, checking his watch as he did. Scully took note of the smart lines carved out by his smile. The intern beside him had a fowlish anxious urgency, bursting to be paid attention to, and Scully knew that his over-eagerness would only cement Waterson’s disdainful neglect. He turned to her at last, a calm, wry expectation.

“Mixed vascular dementia,” she answered. “Likely end-stage judging by his severely apathetic affect and almost absent attention capacity. I attempted an MMSE on him prior to rounds but couldn’t get him to engage long enough to complete the assessment.” After a moment, she added. “Notes indicate he was brought in from a nursing home and hasn’t had any visitors. Family neglect is not uncommon in these later stages when carer burden becomes too high and the patient is no longer capable of recognising the service being done - or the servicer.”

Waterson held her with an esteeming, private pride, tilted up his fine Roman chin and with a satisfied inhale, turned back to his Socratic pupils.

“End-stage dementia,” he confirmed. “That man in there is 63 years old. His condition is terminal. His family won’t visit him. I’ve seen parents hold on to hope for children who have lain comatose for two years, brain dead. Well, that man in there is no less absent, but he’s awake so you can see it in his eyes. Children can’t bear it – their parents are mythic creatures, titans, reduced to an unseeing gaze. It makes them wonder about their own selves, the way it is possible to die before you are dead. They think, 'If I’ll only remember myself for 75 years, I don’t want to be around when I’m gone.' Then one day they open their eyes in a grocery store and they don’t know who or where they are or why they’re holding a cold can of something or maybe even why there’s urine running down their legs, and they just walk around in terror, looking for any clue to remind them, forgetting what it is they forgot.” He let that sit for a moment, then held his hand out for the next patient file. Scully retrieved it promptly.

A few hours later, the other boys were on a lunch break, flirting with an Argentinian, freckled nurse. Scully was in a cramped medical supply cupboard, with the a shelf of viral swabs and disposable masks digging into her back as Waterson pressed her roughly up against the confines, bruising her with the high praise of his need. She made him feel young. He covered her mouth with a sanitised hand.

-

A man with time etched into his face like too many scars. _Close your eyes. Don’t look._ As if she did not know. As if she could not recognise. She saw her old friend. She turned her face away.

The taste of blood was like sucking on life’s batteries. As she lay dying, paralysed by non-death, Scully thought, _How can you ever have enough time?_ For so long she had been so afraid, ashamed of her fear. She had seen the hand of death in a maggot fodder bunny in a box and known how little life gives. For so long she had let herself pass through unscathed. And then the electrode pulse of Mulder. When she’d been bone sick and lying at the reaper’s doorstep, she’d thought how love was the only thing that had helped her survive. So how could it be a bad thing? She’d really thought…with Emily… A year later, and she was no closer than before. How could you ever have enough life? _Love lasts 75 years if you’re lucky._ Scully didn’t believe in luck. She was around when her luck was all gone.

*

Ritter took notes from the Spender weasel handbook, scurried round like a badger, a little boy with a daddy and cash allowance. It was hard to believe they were the same age. He was prickly and skittish and sweaty. Beady. Nauseatingly entitled. Every other guy. She wanted to bully him for his haircut. She wanted to spit on his shoe. When she saw him behind the smoking gun, mouth agape and impishly dumb, his utter stupidity was vindicating. _I hope you kill me, you limp-prick bastard._

The sharp relief of being back in the insulated orbit of Mulder’s arcane gravity was overwhelming. She settled right in, glad to be alone with him again, the hush of him, the stoop, arguing to be on the same side, a united front, whispered closeness, the nearest thing to obscenity. Mulder asking, _Where’s the hurt?_ in a voice so low when there was no one else in the room, like he was in the hospital bed with her, coating her with the thread-count of his concern. He kept his face close, his body hunched in the chair, kept his expression blank so only she could read him. All the lights stayed off. They were honest in silhouette. He was humbly deranged.

Death only looks for you when you seek its opposite. Did he know? The thought that had brushed over her on Fellig’s dark room floor: _What am I waiting around for?_ Was that why death had left her alone? Or did he know what had occurred to her, watching him surrounded by a carousel of children in her mother’s backyard on Christmas morning. Not only was she seeking life, she was yearning fruitlessly for another one. In a way, she was grateful that she had no option. If there were any way, she might not have been able to stop herself from asking Mulder to give her the most primordial thing…She was lying to him all the time now and Mulder hated liars. She was concealing a truth.

In her week in hospital, he visited every day to read out the funniest ads in the classifieds. On Wednesday, she realised he was re-enacting a mash-up of Kate Bush’s _Babooshka_ and _The Piña Colada Song_. She asked one of the nurses for a mirror before he arrived each afternoon, risked a perilous raise of her right arm to fix her blunt hair. The effort required a pre-emptive pump of the patient controlled analgesia button. He brought her fresh socks, his own colour-blind argyles, and rolled them on in double-layers before leaving her be.

Every day, a surge of panic at being around him and a panic at being away. That she had almost died so far from him was more horrifying than seeing their desiccated corpses locked in cobwebbed embrace under the floorboards of a haunted mansion. At least that had made twisted sense.

She thought about it the way patients described chronic idiopathic illness. _I’ve tried everything. Nothing helps._ He turned his phone face-down to hide Diana’s caller ID. He kept her up all night in Kroner, insisting on inane sleepover games until she was so tired she fell asleep fully clothed on top of the covers and woke to find him curled up on a towel on the floor. _I love him. Nothing helps._

But she knew, she knew what it meant to be a man’s selfishness. She’d seen her father relish the pain of leaving his wife for the sea. She’d seen her mother be what her husband did only on his time off. For some men, love was obstacle, wind-resistance. For some women, endurance was legacy. Commemoration was a lover’s duty. But didn’t she have her own reasons? Wasn’t he her selfishness too? Wasn’t she too a man on the sea? Could she really imagine anything more with him than painfully relieving trysts in incidentally clandestine motels off highways en route to another case drawn from the Grimm Brothers’ reject pile? Intimacy through necessity. Intimacy as a sign of throwing the towel in. Maybe they were keeping their own comatose child on life-support. Maybe they were entering a shared end-stage dementia. She only knew how to love by giving bits of herself away. The longer she lived, the more tarnished. She was handing Mulder a bruised apple slice. _Take a bite. I’d rather be gnawed on than to rot in the pit of your palm._

On her two weeks off at home, Mulder brought soup daily, personally microwaved, hung around to watch her eat it before racing off on his various causeless minor rebellions. The opioids were a mass extinction event on her already endangered appetite, but she slurped Campbell’s to appease him and tried not to be sick until he left. Vomiting strained the stitches, so she’d be crying and torn through by pain, doubled over the sink. Mulder wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

Maybe he saw her as a living Brocken spectre. A glowing silhouetted figure appearing godly and larger than all human struggle, rising up through the unearthly mist; really just a magnified shadow of a regular man cast upon mountain clouds opposite the sun. A seraphic immortal. A little lady retching up tomato soup into her toilet bowl.

-

Mulder scanned his mental Rolodex of Scully catnips. First day back and alive called for celebration. He cornered her by the water-cooler of the bull pen, caught the self-conscious glance she threw at the drones around them, and stood a step further away from her than usual.

“You’re the doctor, so how does this work? If I ply you with a celebratory drink, will it go down your mouth and straight out through your bullet hole?”

“Like a punctured water balloon?”

“Like Casper the friendly ghost.”

That worked.

The clock struck home-time and they left wordlessly. They slipped out the back entrance of the Hoover parking lot and Mulder saw her look over her shoulder, a furtive relic of some bygone vice he had left dutifully unanalysed. Paying her the respect of not psychoanalysing her from the get-go as she had paid him the respect of not using his optimistic gullibility against him had gotten them this far while leaving him Mariana Trench deep in the dark. Still, he stuck close by her as they pattered down the fire exit steps, holding lightly onto her elbow to ease the blow of the descent on her recently closed-up wound, unsure whether her silence was exhaustion, anger, sadness, or just silence, and she stuck close to him too. 

Outside, the sky was slanting icy rain down through the back alleys of gloomy, stone Washington. Mulder and Scully wove through cement buildings like rats avoiding sunlight. It was always better not to be seen. There was a hole-in-the-wall typically unfrequented by their fellow men in black a few blocks away, more partial to the kind of customer who would not be able to remember which bar they had even visited when they awoke the next day, much less notice two grimly dressed, close-talkers huddled self-protectively over each other in a shadowy corner booth. 

The joint itself reeked endearingly of sweaty insoles, but Mulder positioned himself strategically near enough to the masking scent of Scully’s _eau de redhead_ , which was somewhere between amber and labdanum. She was probing the ice cubes in her diet Coke with a mini straw the colour of her mouth. Recently her lips had been glossier, plumper, more bored than usual. He wondered at the benefits of all the extra essential fatty acids she had been sprinkling over her yogurts and salads in the form of hemp seeds and pepita. Their thighs were pressed together and their arms, propped up on the table, were joined at the seam of their coat sleeves, but Scully’s gaze skittered from close study of the grain in the scuffed table-top to every boozy corner of the room like she was expecting a raid. Her face was drawn, her body warm. She was thinking.

He nudged her and slid his guava mint mocktail an inch in her direction. At the time of ordering, it had earned a judgemental eyebrow. Now, she glanced up at him tentatively before leaning over his arm to take a sip. The straw caught on her lower lip as she released it delicately and settled back down. She gave it a ‘not bad’ pout.

“Not hard enough?”

She laughed through her nose, scanning the far side of her room.

“It’s a mocktail.”

“Kersh is still on my ass about all the road and maritime related fines I incurred on my little Krump joy-ride. Last thing I need is a DUI.”

He waited for a goody two-shoes remark, but she just thinned her lips in imitation of a smile.

“You know,” he rambled, “in the 18th century, pirates used to lace their rum with gunpowder before storming enemy ships, a ritual observed most notably by a Mister Edward Teach, also known as _the_ Blackbeard. It was a form of Dutch courage, thought to bolster a pirate’s air of crazy-eyed unpredictability. From accounts of Teach, it seems to have worked a charm. Anyway, you think Kersh would let us drink gunpowder shots before work each day if it helped intimidate potential fertiliser trafficking foes more efficiently over the phone?” 

“Likely, the only effect that would achieve would be of the emetic persuasion,” Scully indulged him drily. “A cocktail of carbon, sulfur and potassium nitrate diluted by Smirnoff on ice is enough to make anyone sick.”

Mulder waited for a hint of playfulness to leak into her expression. No luck. He thought of the night he’d spent in Kroner rattling off every road-trip trivia game he could think of, doing his best to save her the panic and probable dread of ending up in bed with him, only to find that the look on her face the next morning when she’d found him asleep on the floor to be that of faintly injured pride. He was swingin’ and missin’ like a naked mole rat.

Over at the bar, one long-haired fellow united his cheek ungracefully with the hardwood floor. A few of his plaid-laden buddies jammed their crimped cigarettes into the corners of their mouths and bent down to haul him up on out of the place. There was a general smokiness in the air, visible in the brown-orange light seeping oozily from dusty sconces on mahogany boarded walls. A neon sign of a pin-up betty was engaged in drowsy pulsing, dousing Scully alternatively in cerulean and hot pink. It was early and there were only three or four other couples sharing in the sound of Etta James over the grainy jukebox and the bored curiosity of the matronly barwoman with a kitchen towel thrown over her shoulder like some kind of uniform. One of the couples was drunkenly exploring the insides of each other mouths in the opposite corner as foreplay to a probable cubicle-set denouement.

“The cast of Cheers meets abject misery,” Mulder annotated.

“So, the cast of Cheers.”

It stung when she was funnier than him. That was his party trick.

“You ever think about how none of these guys could even begin to imagine the things that we’ve seen? And I’m not just talking about – pardon my language – aliens, space ships, et cetera, I’m talking about the more mundane. A mud-logged infant with every mutation in the book. Grown men who steal eight year old girls from their bedrooms and photograph them in a basement. A dissected body.”

Scully turned to him then, a hard pensive look, her full attention.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I do.”

“Locked out,” he continued, fastened in the gloss of her dilated eye, the nearness of her, her hot sweet cola breath. “They don’t know how many lives you’ve saved or what you’ve sacrificed in their name for the truth.”

She watched him, searching. He trained all his powers of radiation on tuning her in.

“Neither do we,” she said at last. “We don’t know anything of that barwoman’s suffering, or if those two saliva exchangers over there are lovers being reunited or having an affair or if they’ve both saved more lives in their line of work than we have combined.”

“Very true. Huh. I thought you’d be more…” She cocked an eyebrow at him as he searched for the word. “Misanthropic.”

“I don’t have to like people to love humanity. Although, I admit, I only started caring about capital-H Humanity after being assigned to you. Before that I had a kind of medical blanket beneficence, but nothing as far-reaching as your sympathies.”

“Right,” Mulder laughed at himself. “Every victim is my sister until proven innocent.”

“I’m speaking of radical compassion,” she corrected.

“Some would argue that ‘radical compassion’ is my Achilles heel, the anti-Popeye’s spinach can.”

“No,” she said. He felt as though he was being reprimanded. “I’ve seen it used against you but it’s not a weakness. The same thing happens with patients. Some doctors approach medicine as though it’s about the eradication of weakness, when it should be about optimising well-being, and that goes beyond traditional metrics of physical health. It encompasses a person’s identity, their humanity. To save a life at the cost of what makes that person’s life worth living is more cruelty than charity. So to suggest that you’d be better off as a hardened albeit less manipulable man would be to miss the point entirely of caring for who you are.”

She was Socrates with a gun, Athena with a Salvation Army cross patch. 

“Good thing you’re my doctor,” he murmured, forgetting he wasn’t actually buzzed. She was brilliant. She verged on intolerably transfixing. There was no one so euphorically contrarian as her in the world. He had the only Scully, the only goddamn one, at his side. “So what makes your life worth living, Agent Scully?”

She studied him for a moment and he knew he’d asked a dangerous thing. He let his eyes drop boldly to the bow of her lips. She pushed herself gently into his arm, leaning in towards him, then stooped to take a sip of his drink.

“Guava mint mocktail,” she answered, pushing back. She fixed her napkin. “I assume the cheque’s on you. Let’s head back before the weather gets bad.”

The weather was already bad. Zeus after Hera comes home early from brunch at Olympus’ finest and catches him making the god with two backs bad. Mulder used his coat as a makeshift portable pergola for the two of them as they huddled at a relative snail’s pace back through the alleyways. Scully wasn’t at the running-in-heels-in-the-rain stage of gut-shot recovery. The rain he couldn’t shield her from had the immediate effect of Shirley Temple-ing her hair. He directed her around puddles, bumped into a dumpster or two, and the gleaming granite of the pavement sounded their steps through the cramped slit between every brutal apartment block.

Scully tripped on the bust wheel of a bicycle he hadn’t noticed sticking out from a heap of cardboard and black plastic. Her breath hitched and she grasped at her gut. His hand went around her waist, taking her weight, trying to keep his coat draped over their heads. They stumbled on. They needed a taxi. The sun was blotted out early and the ground was black, shining with unceasing rain and the promise of nearby streetlights. Scully was breathing sharply as they rounded the second-to-last corner before a main road.

A cloaked mountain of a man leapt out from a shadow behind a fire-escape and Mulder felt the chill of a knife to his throat.

“WALLET! NOW!” the figure boomed, voice breaking. He smelled of narcotic sweat. Mulder felt the man shivering violently against him. Scully had been knocked back against the opposite alley wall and the man had Mulder in a choke-hold. Light gleaming off the blade at his throat glinted across her eyes; wide, dark, sharp. 

“WALLET!” he screamed again, jostling Mulder and nipping his Adam’s apple with the knife.

A flash of lightning. For a dizzy moment Scully’s face was the shining bloodless face of Cathy at the window knocking to be let in. She moved spectrally slow. Her hand reached calmly into her purse. Another flash of lightning, a viper snapping, and she had a gun out and was pointing it and screaming right back like blue electricity. 

“DROP THE KNIFE!” Her voice soared over thunder. She was soaked through, pale, shaking, rigid with determination. Mulder felt the mugger freeze, loosen his grip, then in a frantic shuffle Mulder was knocked with a splash to the ground and the sound of footsteps sprinting through rain disappeared around the lightless corner.

He sprang to his feet and rushed to Scully in time to see a coin-sized blossom of red on the drenched white of her dress shirt. She slumped into his side. They waded through the pouring rain and broke out into the white-wash of a main road busied dispassionately with a melee of peak hour traffic commuters. 

Mulder swung his arm out for a taxi, stepping out onto the road to stop one with his body, blinded by the headlights. The driver screeched to the curb and Mulder ushered Scully in before him. She was giving him her home address when he sidled in, shivering and dripping like a wet dog. The door slammed and the muffled insulation of sound-proofing windows afforded him a moment of clarity. He looked to her. She had a hand pressed over where her wound had reopened and shook her head down at her lap, sensing his breathless question. Her hair hung limp and dark across her cheek.

“No hospital,” she panted, contorted with pain. “I want to go home.”

*

Swallowed by the cradle of her pillows, Scully was a picture of Ophelia floating on her back in white linen. Her hair was an auburn splash. He sat carefully on the edge of her bed. She had changed, dried off, fallen into bed. He was in some spare clothes she kept for him under her bathroom sink.

“You ready?” he asked. She half-opened her eyes in affirmation. He lifted the blanket, reached gingerly to pull up the hem of her baby blue shirt which had already been stained by a haem leak. The wound was puckered and black with blood, save for where fresh ooze coloured it vermillion. He sucked in a breath through his teeth. Scully didn’t look away. 

“The gauze, Mulder,” she said, barely audible. The painkillers were clearly taking effect. No opiates – she’d refused – but even the relief of weaker analgesics was enough to sap her of energy. He’d insisted on doing this for her. Mulder pressed gauze from the first-aid kit with archaeological caution onto her wound, using his spare hand to tear medical tape with his teeth.

His palm stayed over the milky warmth of her hip, running over across her abdomen to soothe her unthinkingly. She sighed into it. He had missed out on this in the ice – seeing. The slight swell of her lower belly, the hollow at her hips, the shadow of her two lowest ribs, the invisible hairs over satin white skin. She moved her chilly fingers onto his, eyes closed.

“I’m tired,” she whispered. The yellow light of her bedside lamp made her cheeks look fuller, and she was as young as she had been in Oregon. “Sometimes, I don’t know…after all that…to die at the hands of a desperate addict in some grimy side-alley.”

“We didn’t die,” he said, low. The knuckles of his free hand went to where the double jump of her carotid was just visible in the little light. The skin at her neck was burning, but her sleeping face was earnest. “We’re so close, Scully. We’re so close. Then, maybe…”

She opened her eyes thoughtfully, zeroing in on him with the weary discernment of someone who had heard that line before.

“There are no shortcuts to the truth,” she said unreadably. She held him in her gaze. There was a shine across her eyes before she turned away, grimacing. Mulder stood, confusing himself with her pain. He mumbled something about leaving her to rest and made his way back home in a black-out of autopilot confusion.

On the insomniac coffin of his couch, Mulder’s nightly reruns consisted of the usual self-reprimand, punctuated by skittish flurries of tangential conjecture and a flash of unrelated newspaper clippings. It was an unkempt archive. That night he saw too the shine in Scully’s eyes. It wasn’t the first time he had made her cry by insinuating a certain possibility. Maybe he was selfish to threaten her with needing more. Maybe he needed show her he was fine to carry on as they were, that he could wait indefinitely, that his medicated ‘I love you’s’ and impulsive kisses were all secondary to what good fun they had as old friends. He could insist that. He could joke about it.

And he had to tell her. There was a tube in a storage freezer with her name on it and a string of numbers. He had to tell her – later, when she was in less pain, when this was over. 

Maybe there were shortcuts to the truth if that was what they needed after all this time, this futile floundering. Mulder only wished he could have waited until Scully made a full recovery before driving what he suspected she would perceive as a knife into the small of her back, like an arrow through the bullseye of her ouroboros. He phoned a friend. Diana picked up the phone. _Hello, 911. What’s your emergency?_


	18. Setting Solid Feet Down on Planets Everywhere

Mulder was in the dog house. He chewed on a monsoon-soaked pillow in Goodland, Florida and angled his dogged snout away from Scully even after she’d held him down biting and scratching and unplugged his feather clogged throat. What more could she possibly need? In Arcadia, canine comedian that he was, he took a dry piss on every leg of furniture in the house and then whimpered and sulked without comprehension when she made him sleep in the yard. Leaving Phoenix, he turned onto Red Mountain Freeway and her hands flew out to the side rests. “Mulder, what are you doing?” Mulder looked between her and the road. She was white with panic. A sign came up: _All Souls Cemetery - 1 mile._ He threw an illegal U-turn, said nothing the whole drive back, locked himself in the dog house when he got home and buried the key in his throat. He yakked it back up in Bellflower among other beasts of his kind. A wolf is a fox and a hound. He thought of pets rubbing their faces against the knees of their owners hunched over and weeping on the bedside, too far for helpfulness, too close for indifference, too attached to distinguish between being a burn and a salve. Scully hid her face in one hand. She was so tired. She sighed and used the other to reach down and rub her thumb twixt his ears. 

Mulder had a bone buried in the garden that belonged only to his friend. He dug it up. He dropped the tube at her feet. She watched the cylinder of life sweat in her hand. He had given her a new want, the one thing that would force her to need other men. So he loved her, so he was back as a stray on the streets. He loosed his own leash and turned himself in to the pound.

The next week, a burning heart, the smell of hot blood on his floor.

-

Where did it end? It was an endless line. It was around in circles. It was a hall of mirrors reflecting the past and future back unto itself. Bruckman said it would never end. Fellig said it would never get better either. Meanwhile, they just kept driving. They just kept chasing their tails. Scully had the worst of her fears stamped on the place only Mulder could lay a light hand: a straight line, contorted in an interminable ring. It began where it ended, over and over again.

All this, she startled awake on his floor. Under the Russian green of his eye, the fervour of his encompassing calm, and she knew. Not even immortals get enough time.

*

Mulder, let me just say it all at once, okay? _A glance at the cautious front of his smile._ I have decided to pursue the possibility of IVF given the opportunity you’ve recently brought into light. I’ve considered the option of anonymous donors but the thought of having any more unknowns put in my body is…well, frankly intolerable. _Pause._ So I-I’m asking you if you’d consider - going in on this with me. _Now quickly._ I know you, I trust you, it- it wouldn’t have to change anything between us. I’d say that you don’t have to have any involvement beyond genetic donation, but the effect it would have on my life would necessarily impact yours, and you’re my friend; regardless of paternity, I’d want my child to know you. _For the plunge._ And most of all, despite everything, you’re just not that kind of man. If you wanted to, if by some miracle- I only know that when I was with Emily, nothing made sense except that you were there, that you did more for her than I could. _He looks away. Take his hand._ Despite the reservations and self-doubt I _know_ you carry, despite the pain blood-relation has caused you in the past, I truly believe that I have never met another man more deserving of family. You should have proof of that, or you could - if you wanted it. _Let go._ I don’t know if I’m saying the right things- _Down-play._ I- I know, I know it’s a lot, I’m sorry. Just to have asked could be enough for me, I promise. Either way, take as long as you need. _Yes._ It’s been so long. _Say yes._ For both of us. _Please say yes to me._

*

The reasoning was ultimately simple: healthy people got cancer. People who recycled correctly and donated all their hand-me-downs to Goodwill succumbed to a mugger or two. Intelligent, cautious-living citizens of promising potential met their end as windscreen wiper pâté every day. Nuns got UTIs, priests contracted cold sores from kissing the wrong baby’s head. Doctors ate bee pollen and eliminated trans fats and simple carbs from their diets and still only lost weight when they were put on no-solid diets for being nigh-fatally shot in the gut. A woman hid her heart in the basement. And the flames – the furnace of human desire - the flames licked at her door whether or not she answered the call. So she asked him, as only a rational person would do.

Yes, loneliness was a choice; so was hope. The latter was the first choice she had seen Mulder make when they’d met and perhaps why he, suspecting deep down what truth underlay his pursuit, tolerated chasing shadows along the oft-looping road which branched only to one end they both knew in their hearts. Perhaps there was a child-sized coffin awaiting them no matter how long it took to visit her grave. Scully understood hope to be a great risk, often one which hinged on indisputable delusion and the outright furthering of inevitable pain; in Mulder she saw also that it was the only difference between an ouroboros and a life.

-

He came to her not knowing what he would say, hoping he would know it when he saw it, hoping and praying that he would say no. But there was only one choice. For once, he saw all the signs. And who else, really, who else in the world…

*

Mulder couldn’t tell anyone about his debut foray into fatherhood, so to keep himself in check he imagined himself telling Skinner. Mulder’s Skinner replied to the effect of, _If you mess this up for her, I’ll fuck you up so bad you won’t know your left nostril from your inner ear hole_ , which pretty much got the job done.

With absolutely no prompting whatsoever from any fraternal relations of a Mister Arthur Dale, Mulder also lucked upon the bright idea of romancing the bite-sized receptacle of his ‘special gift’ in between his intimate appointments with Dr Parenti. So did it arise that Mulder spent an evening play-wrestling with one red-head, tom-boy rascal who, despite having grown up in an all-American household with two older brothers and presumable access to a standard TV, apparently found the concept of baseball completely alien. Well, he was no miser of knowledge. He buttered up the batter up, and – who’d’a thunk it? – Miss Katherine Hepburn with a gun was kittenish and giggly and miraculously, scandalously pliant under the occasional stray kiss on the cheek stolen in between swings.

By the time his child-labourer buggered off claiming acute-onset nausea, there was no mistaking what they were doing. The head of the bat rested at Scully’s feet like a cane, and Mulder’s arms had made the precarious journey of encircling her lower waist. She had her head pressed back into his shoulder and he knew her eyes were closed. He was still swaying, pretending to look past the warm slate of her cheek to the wide field beyond.

“Mm,” she said eloquently. They were losing the hold on things. It was bliss. The air was cool and smelt of fresh grass. Scully nudged his cheek with her own drowsily.

“You know,” Mulder said, muffled by the hair along her temple, “my dad never taught me how to pitch a baseball – never taught me any kind o’ sport. And I’ve been thinkin’, Scully, I don’t care if that kid comes out a boy or a girl or the Mokele-mbembe; as long as they’ve got one good limb and opposable thumbs, I’m gonna teach that psycho-cynic hybrid how to play ball. It’s gonna be a Turner Classic family fuckin montage. I’ve made a list of esoteric indoctrinations already. My thoughts are, if we both come at the kid hard enough from completely opposing angles, they might turn out half-way normal - or they might develop a split personality disorder - who knows? I’m excited. One year ago, I would’ve knifed you in the back of the skull expecting green acid if you’d told me we’d end up here.”

“Mulder…”

“Hmm.” He pulled her against him and dipped in pursuit of the secret in the corner of her lips. "What?"

She lowered her face. He expected swift detachment, but she just pivoted in his arms to face him, her look serious and still kind.

“Don’t get my hopes up.”

Mulder laughed and shook his head in dismissal, pulling her into his chest. She planted herself into his sternum expertly.

“I get something of mine up on a weekly basis in Dr Parenti’s clinic, so fair’s fair.” Her back shook in a laughing groan of feigned disapproval. He palmed her marmalade hair. “For a second I thought you were gonna break it to me that you’d decided to harvest AD Skinner instead. I wouldn’t blame ya. But I mean, look at that guy. If one of his swimmers got to your little eggs I’d be surprised if they didn’t shoot right through the other side.”

At that, she pulled back to snipe him with a twinkling glare. God, he was good. She was like a frat boy in his arms that night: dirty, up for anything. He was Cupid’s full-up dartboard.

“If it doesn’t take,” he said, swept away, “there’s always adoption. Hell, I’ll teach anyone’s kid to play ball.”

She dropped her face again.

“Mulder, adoption agencies aren’t going to give me a child. They wouldn’t even give me Emily after finding out she was mine. Society has progressed far, but an unmarried woman in her thirties with a full-time job disposed to random acts of violence and midnight interstate travel calls is no prime candidate for Turner Classics, as you say.”

“Unmarried is an easy fix,” he shrugged, “although I think your brother would rather walk you down the aisle to an electric chair than to me.”

“Mulder,” she warned, embarrassed. He dipped his chin to catch her eye, feeling like the man of the hour, feeling like Hercules accepted at the Olympian gates.

“If that’s what it came to, I’d marry you,” he asserted easily. She crossed her arms, putting space between them, and he took hold of her shoulders sincerely. “Come on, what we’re doing is already far more biblical. You said yourself - choice is sacred ritual. We’re coming up on the turn of the century; maybe the nuclear family of the twenty-first century does everything back to front.”

Scully was examining the toe of her boot and making an intent dent in the tawny dirt of home base.

“Back to front and upside down,” she laughed, self-deprecating, heartily. He felt delirious.

“I got a movie with that name back home-”

She threw her arms around him fast and firmly. It was so innocent, he was sure they'd made the quantum leap to some alternate universe. They were in some faerie realm. He had never held anyone, never kissed anyone, never been with any man or woman before that moment. She was the world’s very first.

When he slipped an arm free of her vice-like embrace and used it to tip her face lightly back, the stadium lights made glimmering love to the candy pink swell of her lips. Her eyes were Dr Manhattan blue. The urge to kiss her was irresistible and he felt the last thread of fear tug loose from their valiantly long-maintained seam. Her belly was warm against him. Her lips-

“If you kiss me,” she stopped him with a whisper, eyes on his mouth, making no move to step away, “I’m worried the night won’t end here.”

He scoffed in disbelief and made an immediate second advance.

“Maybe it’s too much for right now,” she said, ducking this time, but her breath was hot and quickened and he knew enough about pupil dilatory responses to take a sure hint.

He moved to kiss her again, beaming.

“Mulder,” she pleaded, a little hand to his chin. She giggled again and her sober coyness made his simian brain go insane. She wasn’t being prude, he understood that. Still he let out a cave-man inspired groan and dropped his forehead against hers with his teeth set and his hands criss-crossed and gripped tight on the back of her coat.

“You’re making obeying Dr Parenti’s orders very hard,” he said, moving from foot to foot lightly, restlessly. Her lids shut as she sucked in a long breath. “No pun intended.”

Just like that, she lurched to kiss him. He had to dodge the lunge of her tossed-away inhibitions.

“Really? That’s what convinced you?” he laughed. They were both out of breath and could not seem to let go of one another. Having spent so long entwined through the night, he had a feeling that separation would require her surgical expertise. He returned his forehead to hers and they made efforts to calm themselves down. “You’re right – not now. Dr Parenti has me in a three-day pre-donation chastity belt.”

“Okay,” she said, taking a settling breath. “I don’t want to marry you, Mulder.”

He pulled back, amused.

“Is it the nose?”

Her expression was painfully earnest and the tip of her nose was pink from the excitement and the midnight zephyr of cold.

“I just want one last thing,” she said, eyes fixed on his throat and fingers hooked under the hem of his winner’s jersey, “of which no one has any record. One last thing that isn’t handed over in part to the system. I don’t want it to turn into another piece of evidence in some X-file one day. As it is, there’s no tangible evidence of our friendship, nothing that could be held up in court – just what we know of each other. I don’t want anyone else to have any proof.”

“You’re the skeptic,” he said, pressing his knuckles to her cheek, her temple. “I love you. How’s that for your proof?”

She searched him with an expression between peace and heartache.

“You don’t have to say it,” she told him, softly seizing his palm by her cheek. “I already know.”

“I’m beginning to think that that’s the whole point.”

This time, the urge was too strong apparently, but she saved them by faking poor aim, depositing a short-staying kiss on the inner edge of what could be reasonably defined as not lips but cheek, before reaching to wrap her arms up around his neck. He had to lift her a bit to anchor her there, like a child hanging onto a tree, then she withdrew and patted his chest amiably. 

“Soon,” she promised. Then she left him floating on his feet.

All these years, Mulder had thought that hoping for something beyond Samantha would render her distant from him, would loosen the rope he’d held so taut between them across the temptation of the years to forget. But the heart did not fill up, it grew to inhabit the room it was given to grow. And whatever love he had been keeping on hold for his sister in the tiny message in a bottle of his heart, spilled open and blew out to the size of the moon.


	19. Maybe the Dead Know

Diana felt it the way predators sensed the aim of a camouflaged poacher in the jungle. There was a barrel trained on her eye.

She knew it the first time she met Mulder. He was glossy back then, slim, both vain and completely indifferent to his own luxuriant sex appeal. His morning hair regimen - pomade, Grease combs, hair dryers and all - was, she suspected, more in the name of seducing some figment mental Elvis than any playboy primp routine. The night after solving their first case, they landed upon a method of blowing off steam which was mutually agreeable; she took him back to her motel room and suggested it to him by helpfully unbuttoning all of her clothes. He participated with an infuriating imperturbability and innocence. His eyes were opalic green, shifting along the spectrum in the lunar torchlight. He was dazed and pliant beneath her and grunted and grimaced like a boy when he came. But he would not be derailed. The next morning, he was up and connecting dots between the Babylonian goddess Tammuz and Jungian philosophies on the transient separation of ego and body during sex – the death and rebirth of consciousness alloyed by a momentary coexistence – and how their captured killer had experienced a similar petit mort in the moment of execution, creating a transcendent oneness with soul he simultaneously stamped out and tossed away. There was bad coffee steaming on the bedside stand. The FBI’s most promising criminal profiler struggled with a Windsor knot like any man who had learnt the skill necessarily on his own. _That’s for you,_ he said, nodding to the coffee with an unassuming smile. She knew then. When she died it would be by his hand, indirectly or however else. Her relief at a killer so pure was beyond description. She mourned for him already.

*

She knew it the first time she saw Mulder with his best friend. He and Scully were at a Thai place just out of town, one Mulder had attempted to coax Diana along to once long ago before he’d gotten the gist of how their private life was to operate – that is, privately. It was in the third year of their intensely involuted partnership, and Diana watched from afar as always. There was some suspicion that they’d made the detour in order to meet a source covertly. It became evident within minutes of watching them chow down on pad see ew and satay chicken sticks with college aged voracity that they were, wonder of wonders, simply sharing a meal between friends.

It was the sort of establishment which found virtue in its gloomy shabbiness. The fluorescent lights were non-functional, the seating was an assortment of plastic and metal backyard barbecue chairs, and all the patrons were either of South East Asian descent (a reassuring endorsement), balding corporate black ties with their red-lipped affair of the month, or two grimly dressed FBI agents hunched inexplicably close in the shadowy corner of the room.

Scully hooked her little girl arm under Mulder’s to fork a black bean sauced broccoli from his plate and he returned the favour by lowering his mouth directly onto her chicken skewer and taking it in his teeth like a dog. She ate like a poor boy in a Victorian orphanage. Mulder licked his thumb and rubbed ungraciously at a spot of peanut sauce on her cheek. She swatted at him, turning her face away to apply a napkin vigorously, clearly enraged at her own mortification. Then they resumed whatever esoteric ongoing conversational foreplay they had worked themselves into so single-mindedly.

They were kind of funny, kind of irritating, almost endearing. Scully fancied herself intimidating. Mulder humoured her. They were two outcasts smoking amateur-rolled joints behind the school gym and dubbing it rebellion. They were childhood best friends playing detectives. Scully was Tinker Bell, so small she only had room for one huge feeling at a time. Mulder was head of the Lost Boys.

Diana sympathised briefly with Walter Skinner. His angry little ducklings toddling out of line, snapping at every rustling mass in the bush. Did they not know where all this was headed? They took hope so seriously. They believed somehow in the truth.

Diana pitied them, she envied them. She found them highly annoying. And despite it all, she feared they would despise her if they knew. There was a purity in their bullheadedness. Their judgements were naive and severe.

*

Diana knew it a few weeks before the two of them realised Scully was pseudo-terminally ill. The moment she figured it out, she began thinking of divorce lawyers, then she made the most of her man while she could still think of him that way.

They were in bed, as always. The lights were off, as always. Mulder was trailing a finger down her sternum midline. His eyes were black and shining. His eyes that glowed in the dark. His body was glistening blue. Diana reached for last ditch honesty: “We’re always going,” she said.

“Going where?” His voice was low, distracted. He moved his hand behind her right knee, tugged her leg open towards him.

“We’re only headed one way,” she said, hiding her breathlessness. He was propped up on one elbow, sliding his curled fingers up the inside of her thigh. “I feel like I never come back.”

At that he stilled. She saw the flutter of his masticator, a gleam of resentment cross his eye. 

“Well I’m here,” he told her flatly. _Yes_ , she thought, _for now. You don’t know._ She took over, seizing the opportunity. She laid it on him. This was how they spent love on each other. They made each other feel better, then exhausted. It came and went quickly, like resetting a broken bone. They were miserable. He turned away from her afterwards, hugged himself as he slept. _You don’t know, but I do._

*

She knew when Scully cornered her in an empty nurse common room in the Georgetown Memorial Hospital. The man they both loved was down the hall cracking open his mind. Scully was glowing with ire.

“How can you do this to him?” She was whisper-shouting. A week in Africa and a mild sunburn was all it took to say hell to civility. As if they were the same age. Though she be but little, she is fierce.

“I’m trying to help him. I think you’ll find I’m the only one who can.”

Scully’s skin had a oestrogenic luminescence to it. Diana wondered in passing if she could be pregnant, remembering immediately the role she’d had in that impossibility. Perhaps the young woman was simply full-term with the labour of love.

“You have done nothing but act self-servingly under the guise of friendship since you re-entered his life. He trusts you. You were once his friend. I don’t see how, all things considered, you have done anything but lead him to this.”

“The path to the truth is not easy and is not in any one of our controls, least of all mine. I know what pain he can bear.”

“Haven’t we have borne enough already?!”

Diana allowed herself one quick scoff.

“Dana,” she said, tired and alone and fed-up with the moral high horse, “don’t kid yourself that your life has been tough. You chose difficulty – that is, if you believe in choice to begin with, which for the record, I don’t. You came from a middle class, plum average family; being Irish Catholic is not a psychosocial trauma, and neither is missing daddy for a few months of the year. My father was a vicious drunk. And my mother got high on oven gas the night before my senior prom. That’s my family. So forgive me for thinking I’ve been better than the world has asked me to be. I have no illusions about where I’m headed. I know the cost of my goal. I know too that I’m doing something to make it worthwhile. Ask yourself, really, in all your righteous struggle and suffering, what have you actually achieved in improving this world?”

“But what if it wasn’t the whole world that needed your help?” Scully snapped back, possessed by something holy. “What if it was just one person? By benefitting millions and neglecting the one, have you really succeeded so nobly as you might think?”

In the few seconds of silence Diana used to collect herself unexpectedly, a nurse entered the room. She threw them the usual look.

“Wise words, Agent Scully,” Diana whispered tightly. “If it weren’t for Fox picking at the one chink in your otherwise impressive powers of discernment, I expect you might have gone far in your career at one time. But I don’t pity you. I wouldn’t do you that disservice.”

“Nor I you,” she said through grit teeth. “Just remember, if he dies, how deeply he trusted you.”

“Mulder shares my interests, you forget. Don’t think you know him better or more intimately. I’ve had dinner with his father, I’ve shared his bed, I’ve met his mother and god if she isn’t exactly like mine - give it a few years. He and I are the same.”

“No,” Scully said. “You’re not. Because Mulder has me.”

With no parting sorrow, she slipped from the room in a rage. Of course he loved her. She was unbearably good.

Diana made herself an insipid black tea and sat down. The poacher zeroed in.

*

Diana knew Teena Mulder would kill herself. She knew Samantha was already dead. She knew that Scully would never have a child, and even if she did, she would never really have one. She knew that if Scully tried to share that child with Mulder, they would only share in intractable loss. Diana knew that the truth was nothing. And most of all, she knew her end was awaiting her like a violent lover at the kitchen table with a stick.

*

Diana knew when Mulder was spread out on the gurney, naked and helpless, very much as she had always seen him. She turned to the cigarette man, hating her late-arriving weakness. It was all too late. Mulder had pronged through her mind. He knew everything as she did, but he knew it from the standpoint of someone with limitless love.

“This could kill him,” she said pointlessly. 

The cigarette smoker unbuttoned his shirt placidly. He had a god-complex the way people had diarrhoea: leaking and reeking everywhere.

“It could kill me,” he answered in his rancid sing-song inflection. “But I am only one man. So is he.”

All it took was three words of false equivalence to shine the light on a life of misspent misery. Diana waited for the cigarette man to be bolted down, then she left with a stolen key card and betrayed her life’s work for an envelope slipped under the Other Woman’s door. They were selfish for the same essential thing.

*

Diana knew they would send a familiar face. It might have been solace just as well as it might have been indignity. Alex Krycek was not their finest dirty boy. He waited for her to finish in the shower and step out fully clothed. In the meantime, he helped himself to green tea.

All the lights were off. She preferred it that way.

“Where do you want to do it?” he asked her, burning his Ken doll lips on an impatient sip.

“My bedroom,” she said, leading him there through the swallowing dark. It was furthest from any neighbours. She didn’t want to wake anyone. 

Diana lay down. Mulder would prefer her to have been killed peacefully in her sleep. So it would be, so it would seem anyway.

“Okay,” Krycek said unceremoniously and he raised his non-plastic arm.

“Alex,” she stopped him, adjusting the covers. She hated to have so big a bed. Mulder’s side was a cavernous hole. “Haven’t you ever been inspired by inconvenient sympathy? Haven’t you ever questioned the emptiness of refusing human loyalty?”

“Where Mulder is concerned?” he laughed in his edgy way. She could see nothing of him but the shine off his leather jacket and his bimbo lashes. “You of all people should know. He’s a hard man to shake from your bones. Maybe we’re not so different.”

She drew the line at insult so close to her end.

“If an exterminator saw you in the street he’d throw a rat trap at you.”

Krycek cocked the gun.

“Please,” she said. “Wait until you get word.”

Krycek fished his burner Nokia out with his cyborg hand. They waited. He received a ten second call.

“Mulder just showed up at a hospital emergency department downtown.”

“Give me a minute. Maybe he’ll reach out.”

“Okay, a minute.” Krycek kept his weapon trained. “I have a ride waiting for me downstairs.”

He only waited seventeen seconds. Like a doctor jabbing at two instead of on three. Perhaps it was mercy. Perhaps it was simple impatience. Either way, he was a terrible shot. Diana wasn’t sure where the bullet hit her, but she lived another few minutes after he left, feeling no pain, no Mulder. She waited for him still, for the groping fingers of his pulsatile satellite mind to stretch across the wet charcoal of Washington and probe her in a final, telepathic goodbye. Then there was nothing anymore.

It took a few days for someone to find her. A downstairs neighbour complained of water warping the ceiling after a heavy rain, not seeing the haemosiderin darkness of the gyprock bulge. So it goes.

In the end, she had done a good deed, but crucially not alone. It was more than just Mulder. It was the land lord who came in on his days off to fix air conditioning in July. It was the physiotherapist who wiped her face when getting out of bed the first time after being shot in the lung was so painful it made her throw up. It was her grandmother being the only vague memory she had of being cared for, a sapphire hairpin slipped into her hand with the conspiracy of discreet love. It was the children screaming and dancing with gay abandon in the hydrant spray on an oppressively sweltering eve. Perhaps success was a relay race. Perhaps there was only purpose in brushing hands while passing the torch. Perhaps knowing all along just prolonged her death into life. To be stillborn was to acquiesce pre-vitally to the inevitable. Even if you knew, even then… Kicking and screaming was the first sign of a neonate coming to life. But she had known all along she would die. And she did, and what then.


	20. Buoyant, Bizarrely Benign

Simple people had two voices. The one they spoke with, and the truth in their hearts. But most people had more voices than that. There was also what they told themselves which was different from both the truth and what they said aloud. There was the voice of conscience which was sometimes split from the truth and split further into good and evil and other stops in between. There was the voice of reason, the voice of insanity, and the performer’s voice which told every person who heard it something different simultaneously. There was also Mulder, down the proverbial throat of whom the fire hose of all these voices was being funnelled, like a boy’s head held down a toilet bowl being told to drink up. And then there was Scully. She had one voice and it was the truth. It sounded like his, it belonged to him, and its honesty was unified with everything. Her voice was a swimmer’s hand moving through the current with a stamina pulse that stilled him. She pushed off, dove her way down and where they met it was quiet and there was no light. Lured back to life by a beneficent siren. She opened her mouth and what floodlight poured out was amplified violently. Moses speaking to God. The face of her brought Mount Sinai down. There were no pretences, no veils, no escape routes, only a beacon so strong that its light emitted a sound. There were three words she left unsaid by her outer voice and their sanctity and privacy was such that they could not be recorded here nor anywhere else but the chalice overflow of his mind. With that, she begged him. Return of the prodigal son to the arms of his only friend.

*

"Does your head hurt?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Are you in any pain?"

"No."

"Any changes to your vision?"

"No."

"Your sense of smell?"

"No."

"Any feelings of-"

"Catching wind of that headache, actually.”

Scully folded her arms. He received her best schoolteacher chin-dip with sunshine insolence. She bore down on him from above and he sat with his hands innocently in his lap, gazing up in wait of judgement. Theirs was a de facto positioning. A lowly darer, an inquisitor on an equalising platform.

Joy! Contentment was his primary affliction of late. Mulder basked in the defect. He was on his couch, the lamps were all on and suffusing the evening with an amber Scully glow. She made the lights go on in the world.

Her hands went from crossed over her chest to propped on her hips, scrutinising.

“Okay,” she came to a verdict. “I’m going to remove the bandage.”

“Sure you can’t leave it on a couple days more? Me and Frohike got a bet going about how much sympathy pull it can get me down at the grocery store.”

Scully’s eyes narrowed and she kneeled on the couch beside him. He folded his left leg up, let the other hang down under direction to turn towards her. He had been in sweats for a week straight, a new set every day; Scully had him on a clean-clothes-only wardrobe regimen. Herself, she still came in her car coats and wide-legged black pants and form-fitting dress shirts even though she stayed with him the whole day and half the night too (for a midnight check-in) and returned back again at 6am wearing a variant of the same monchrome uniform. The hospital had only agreed to discharge him so early on Scully’s insistence, as his doctor, that she was organising round-the-clock community care. She was the multidisciplinary team, she was the entire healthcare workforce. She was unwrapping him gingerly, watching his face for pain as the last of the bandage coiled undone. She was taking his pulse with one hand; two hands, just to be thorough. Who knew you could take a pulse by pressing palm to palm?

“Mulder,” she said, moving her fingers from his radial pulse to be still tethered lightly to his wrist, a thumb running over his carpal tendon. “Would you hate me if I asked to do a cranial nerve exam on you one last time?”

“Depends. Do we both have to take our pants off or just me?”

“That’s for a lower limb neurological exam, hot-shot.” Her hand left him, went to an imaginary quadrant of his optical field. “Cover one eye, tell me when you see my finger wiggling.”

“Now,” he said. “Hey, since I’m – now – fully conscious and able-bodied – now – what do you say to – now – uh, hanging out here for the night?”

“Very good, any double vision?” She reached into her pocket for a pen torch as he dutifully shook his head, then she was leaning close and squinting, nose scrunched in concentration, shining things down his pupils and assessing concentricity. Very sexy. Satisfied, she sat back and her gaze fell askance. “Actually, I was considering staying the night. Follow my finger. I’m concerned about your stitches bleeding now that I’ve removed the bandage. Mulder, just with your eyes for God’s sake. How many times have we done this?”

“Always feels like the first,” he said and as only a man whose skull had recently been coconut halved could, his let his hand make its way up her thigh. For a moment, she was with him. Her finger stilled midway through the H-figure sign, her hand slowly fell, her blink grew heavy. He felt her weight on the couch tilting into his ready sphere. He hooked a finger through her belt-loop. Suddenly she was up off the couch, arms folded again. He couldn’t distinguish recent major head trauma concussion from déjà vu.

“Sorry, Mulder, sorry, I-” She was pacing, regarding him with the hurried sideways glance before she stopped and faced him determinedly. “I’m afraid that…certain peaks…of certain forms of exertion…could cause your intercranial pressure to spike to such a degree that-”

“You’re worried that if we throw down, both my heads will explode simultaneously.”

Scully coughed to hide a snort and squashed her dirtiness down into a pointed double chin.

“Funny, that’s just how Avicenna explained it.”

“No kidding. Seriously Scully, I couldn’t be more robust if my mom was still makin’ me down a glass of milk for my bones every night before bed.” He rose gallantly, arms akimbo. “I’m the perfect- whoa.” Mulder swayed and flopped back down on the couch like a falling paper man. “I think I mighta entered the wormhole dimension for a second there, Einstein 2.0.”

Scully was all over him momentarily before she flew off to the kitchen and returned to his side with a brimming glass, one solicitous hand returning to his brow and the other tight on his arm. He wanted to slot himself into the money-bag slit of her practitioner’s frown. She resat herself down next to him, took his glass when he was finished, placed it on the side table, and patted her lap with doctorly professionality. He lay obediently down across her with his agate quartz amethyst banana split head propped on the arm rest and his torso cradled like a baby in her two, steady arms. The exploratory look in her Gatorade-blue eyes verged on unabashedly doting. 

She ran a hand over his cheek and temporal lobe.

“God, Mulder, did they cut your hair with toenail clippers?”

Rich coming from a woman who clearly self-administered a sympathy close-shave the second she saw his short shear.

“Actually, I did it myself,” he said, by-passing that jab magnanimously. “Pulled it all out in my brief pre-straitjacket stint. Calling it Cuckoo’s Nicholson.”

She laughed, easy, indulgent, miraculously carefree.

“Hey, that’s medicine right there,” he said, throwing his arm up around her neck, a yoke adjoining two beasts of burden. “Gimme some of that, you’re my doctor.”

Under his haul, her lips landed, pleased and spread out from beaming. He got a lick of the teeth in her smile. Pampering her was so easy. Patting her on the head could do the job. It took sorry little to make her feel desired. And this, the mother of his bright blue-eyed son! Ah, he knew things! He knew good happy things he couldn’t begin to now say.

“Scully,” he said instead, medicated by her dopey lazily chiding smile. “I saw into your mind. I heard you.”

“Mulder, no you didn’t.” Her drugged happiness sobered ever so slightly under the coffee drip of suspicion. “Did you?”

He wiggled his eyebrows.

“Mulder, no. That’s not- That’s-!”

Mulder pursed his lips faux-thoughtfully. Superstition got the better of her.

“Mulder, what did you see?!”

He grinned deviously. “We could exchange fantasies to even the playing ground if you want, although not nearly as many of mine take place with you starting under my desk.”

“Mulder!” In a state of apparent distress, she grabbed a nearby pillow with a Navajo print and began to beat him.

“The things that poor basement filing cabinet has seen, Scully!” he cried, arms thrown up in self-defence. The barrage continued, all cautious regard for his head injury out the window. “Two perfectly-sized things, to be exact!” He snatched her duck-down stuffed weapon and tossed it away, seizing her resisting hands. He felt young in her lap. He wanted to say, “You’re my best friend.”

“Mulder, if that were in fact true, it would be cheating,” she reprimanded him, squirming in his lock-hold. The look on her face was one of exquisite self-loathing. “Like you haven’t got a mammoth archive of- of involuntary physiological responses to certain intrusive images that would chasten the likes of even David Lynch, I am sure.”

“Hey, it wasn’t just you I got a sneak peek into.” He let her go free. “You were just the only one whose thoughts contained extensive record of ‘involuntary physiological responses’ to my certain pheromonic bouquet. CK One, by the way.” For that, she barely even pretended to whack him. She threw her head back against the couch dramatically, but there was warmth in her despair. Now that he had wooed her, he could get away with anything.

After a moment she asked, evidently despite herself, “Can you hear me now?”

He nodded. Barely. It was pleasant, nothing more than a smooth buzzing pressure like a vibrating massage chair for his cerebral folds. The closer she was, the stronger he felt the lamplight of her mind.

“Who else did you hear?” she asked, serious now. He loved her in the moments she stood in the palm of his hand, believing - for arguments sake. He could say anything.

“Everyone.”

Scully took a deep breath and released it, examining.

“Diana?” she asked eventually.

He nodded again.

The sad, quiet guilt of The Other Woman took residence in her face. A blind girl. All women but her were Other Women. She was his lady, the hook he hung his old coat on by the door. She was his old coat too. She looked like the shape of him, smelt of his smell, felt like the skin of his skin. She kept the frost off his back.

He reached up, ran a thumb down her cheek, over the seat of her lips, mirroring.

“Scully,” he called, summoning her attention. “Where Diana is concerned, I hope you haven’t mistaken my mood for indifference. I grieved her. I’ve been grieving that woman so long. I was mourning her from the start. I think she was trying to prepare me for something she saw as inevitable, maybe fatally. Loss…is loss is loss, whether you expect it or not, but I do at this point. I’m sure you do too. There is something, actually, that I have been surprised by in the wake of her death, but not grief – something I think Diana died in part to preserve, something which you have fought by my side for since the time we first met.”

“Hope,” she answered, an embodiment.

He smiled. A white beach, a wind carrying, a child’s imprint in the sand. 

“Yeah. You have no idea.”

-

As early as ancient Babylon, man selected a day upon which a new temporal leaf could be communally proclaimed and used as an excuse for anything. The Babylonians chose the vernal equinox as an annual rebirth of the natural world. On January first, the Romans decorated their homes with laurel, made sacrifices to Janus for prosperity, attended bacchanalia. According to folklore, the Chinese New Year originated with the myth of a beast called the Nian. The Islamic New Year began at sunset on the last day of the month of Hajj pilgrimage. In Gujarat, India, the day after Diwali. In New York, the ball dropped at midnight at the turn of the Western century. All that history of pomp and circumstance, and Mulder only used it to lean over and say, _Hello again._

They said nothing of her driving him home. They said nothing as she held lightly onto his arm and followed him up to his door. They said nothing when the door closed and she stood waiting for him in the echoing dark. Words fell to the wayside. There was steep inadequacy in all things defined. Namelessly, they respoke everything. They had said it all already. She led him to the couch, allowed him to sit down. She kneeled over his lap, legs parted steadily. She kissed him. His mouth unfastened beneath hers, his pioneer face angled high. They leaned into the leather, chest to chest. They undressed each other, this time physically. The tan smell of the upholstery, the rush of their breathing, the pile of serious clothes on the floor. The aquamarine glow of the tank shone on her skin and his. She saw herself in his eyes, the disbelief as he let his good hand trail up her midline, cataloguing the tender landmarks it encountered at higher altitudes. Mulder smiled humbly. His innocence made her laugh in a whisper of surrender. Impatience and need edged away but it was a sin to rush happiness. Mulder watched as she lowered herself. Slowly, they moved onto the heady climb. He rid himself of his sling, but Scully kept his one arm cradled carefully. Reattaching, his tongue was silky and hers was innovative. She massaged his shoulder, his neck, ran ruin tracks through his hair. And he was all everywhere, luxuriating, making wealthy use of his able hand, quickly too much, even handicapped as he was by one half. Her senses buckled out, like a child of famine going into shock after overeating on a donated meal. She was panting already. Her hair pitched down around both of their faces, a privacy from their daytime selves. She came up from his mouth to breathe. He combed her chin with his teeth. He kept up the pace readily, one arm lifting, replacing, two bodies ricocheting. Something like holding each other at gunpoint in the Alaskan Arctic, unkempt and buck wild. Something like a chemotherapeutic needle entering a distended vein. Something like one hand sliding into another, hauling each other up from the hard-wooded ground. Something like boots pounding the tarmac down as they ran in pursuit. Something like white light thrusting through the black of an abandoned old mine. Something like pushing open a basement floor door. But this time, she could see him. This time, he was seeing her. There was no hiding what they had done. They grew in terminal momentum. The coil mounted. Her breath caught painfully. Scully tightened the loop of her arms round his head, curled inward to hide her face in the cave of his neck. “No,” he puffed. With difficulty, she rose to face him. He took all her hair in one psychic hand. The burrow bred in the well of her chest. She closed her eyes desperately. “Scully, don’t,” he said, between an order and a plea. He had his limber, gold neck craned up, lithe, exposed - his eyes were receptive, like clear water. It was unbearable. She tried to kiss him to have something to cover herself with but she was past co-ordinating. He pressed up. She drew in. He pulled her weight quickly down and she caught on a hook and tugged free, making a freeing sound. Mulder struggled with his next breath and went too. A loosing jolt, a stumble aiming ground-wards. Then they were allies collapsing, fastening the lopsided circles of their arms around each other’s head and torso. They pressed nose to cheek, cheek to chin, chin to brow, lip to everything. Bristle against navy-brat clean. Twitching, slowing down. Relief so severe, they each allowed one brush of a sob. Their shared skin was cool and formed silky adhesions. Her belly was soft against his, rose and sunk in tandem. Then they fell sideways and asleep. Some things they realised before they were born. Like children, they rested that way. Nobody noticed a thing.


	21. At Ease in the Never-Ending Night

One vial, twenty ova of questionable biophysical integrity, enough for one good cycle of IVF, enough for the development of four viable embryos, five if she was lucky, six if she went to Mass on Sundays, all of which would require ten to twelve days of pre-implantation intramuscular progesterone injections, fifty milligrams per dose, and another ten or so days post-implantation to reduce the risk of miscarriage, or weeks, months more if she could negotiate it, four blood tests, three sperm donations, a thirty-two percent chance of achieving a clinical pregnancy in a woman aged thirty to thirty-four, a twenty-one percent chance of carrying a live-birth to term, forty-six chromosomes, one man, one woman, and a necessary cocktail of coincidences and impossibilities both cosmic and mundane the sum of which were all in all unquantifiable.

But at the end of the day, the math was simple. One chance. It was more than she had dreamed of.

Dr Parenti raised the complication of an unintended multiple gestation, an increased possibility with in vitro fertilisation. Scully sensed Mulder go still in the corner of the clinic room where he was busying himself with what he most certainly did not recognise as a Pederson speculum. Multiple gestations…twins, triplets, sextuplets. For the first time in her life, gluttony showed its face on her resume of deadly sins.

She would gobble them all up. She would gorge herself on babies, and she couldn’t even say for certain why. Although, imagine two little Mulders wreaking havoc on her life, orangutans hanging off her limbs as she lumbered around Hoover Building, grabbing at her hair and squeaking her nose as she sat opposite a constipated Skinner. Imagine cataloguing their neurodevelopmental milestones, testing their grasp and root reflexes, bearing witness to the greatest biological experiment in real time. A Von Trapp clan of pseudopsychics with Mulder’s wild eyes, Missy’s nose, Charlie’s freckles, her father’s barrel of a chest, her mother’s steady chin, Samantha’s chocolate hair. And even if all they had was her name on their birth certificate beside the words “Child of:” she wouldn’t care, she swore to God she wouldn’t care. Oh, but she would take even one! One live child! Even that would spoil her. Yes, a glut of supreme proportion.

She did everything right. She made Mulder wear looser pants and she stoically endured lower car air-conditioning temperatures in the lead up to his donations, she ate five servings of vegetables, two servings of fruits, met her daily folate, iron, and iodine requirements through dietary intake and still chugged down women’s supplements just in case, she exercised to the point of exertion but not breathlessness, she slept a full eight hours every night, she cut out caffeine, poured water on her packet of stress cigarettes, timed her injections well, placed icepacks fruitlessly over the bruises, didn’t complain about looking like a contusion-mottled balloon, nor the abdominal bloating, nor the breast tenderness, nor the worse-than-usual headaches, nor the constant fatigue nor any other symptom all those naturally juiced up progestogenic women experienced in the first trimester of their godsent pregnancies.

For weeks she lived on the brink of reproductive plucking. Had the hand of Persephone reached down and cracked her open, all inside she would have glistened. She was a heavily seeded fig all purpled, the jewelled interior of an emperor’s pomegranate. She gave herself every advantage. She was ready to burst.

The day came. They waited. A week passed. Two. Scully dared to write down a girl’s name in her diary margins, then a boy’s, even though she already knew – for a boy, William. Four weeks. She was delirious. Mulder spent every night in her bed and they held their breath together. They didn’t dare speak about it for fear of startling the thing out of her, but he kept his palm over her belly as he slept, waiting, feeling for the quickening.

Henry Weems fell twenty-nine stories into a bed of linen, Richie got a dead mobster’s liver and became a real boy. Could it be? Perhaps there was room for two more in the ranks of the few lucky ones. 

One chance.

On the night of the fifth week at eleven twenty-two, Scully awoke with bad cramps. She was bleeding by the time she arrived in the ER. Mulder was drinking with the Lone Gunmen. She didn’t call him until she was on her way home and he rushed to meet her. All day she had been repeating, “Just another week, then we can hear your heartbeat.”

She just cried, she cried until she was sore and shaking. Mulder stayed, which she took as forgiveness. He saw her buckle under the burden of hope and with ease he shouldered her load.

*

In the devil’s instant, doctor, pardoner, and executioner shook hands. There was no justice. If there was, it was no more than a system created for and enforced by man, not only imperfect but at best biased and at other times cruel. It was euthanasia, only the one whose suffering ceased was not the one who had died. She brushed wings with horror. She underwent metamorphosis in a fugue state and was permanently altered by a transient change. In communion with evil, triumph. In intimacy with perversion, escape.

Scully refused medical examination. She and Mulder ignored mandate and fled to some janky, affair laden motel just across the border to avoid having to testify. Did they really need her to spell it out for them? What the fuck did they think happened there? 

They arrived at their twin bed room under the name of Mr and Mrs F. M. Luder around three in the morning and by that time she was in and out of catatonia. Mulder guided her towards the bathroom like a stroke patient, one hand on each shoulder. She stood in the shower until she realised Mulder was calling her name. He eased open the bathroom door eventually and said, “Oh, Scully, your clothes are all wet,” when he saw her. Out of necessity, he stripped down and got in, wary and slow, and she watched him like something feral. He reached for the complimentary soap and she fought the urge to scratch and bite him. Sensing this, he washed her with water only. He turned her to be facing him and, in her exhaustion, she folded and curled into his chest. He reached around her then and plucked a shard of glass from just above her scapula, then he leaned down to suck on the wound lightly and it stopped the stinging. “You’re sproutin’ wings, Raguel,” he attempted, straightening up. She turned away and closed in on herself.

For the rest of the week, she ate on command or not at all. She sat. She ordered things off the infomercial channel on Mulder’s credit card and didn’t get up to answer the door when the take-away she’d phoned for arrived. She sensed Mulder’s uncertainty about whether or not his presence was wanted but found no reserve in herself to offer reassurance. Still at night, when he got up from bed to go to the toilet, she got up and went with him. She sat on the rim of the bath until he was done, not looking. Then she followed him back into their unlit room, and they slept separately in their single beds.

One night, Mulder burst into the kitchenette. She found herself standing by the sink with an orange in one hand, and a butter knife in the other like a body possessed with the Scurvy-fearing soul of a British sailor. She took a moment to orient herself, a moment further to register the panic veiled by Mulder’s habitually blank expression. His eyes were trained on the knife like he had seen it before, another time. She dropped it, dropped the orange too, dropped her face into her hands as both items fell to the ground. 

Mulder was beside her the next instant. He was playing the part of medic now, stooping his face to catch hers, whispering and hushing. This wasn’t about one thing. It was years in the making and it was unending. She was spent and Mulder seemed like he had grown in size just to envelop her more completely.

“Scully, we both know what you did was illegal but it was right, we both know that.”

She sniffled and managed to step back. With her arms crossed and her sacrum against the kitchenette sink, she said, “Mulder how can we operate with integrity as agents of a force wherein those two statements are not mutually exclusive?

Mulder leaned down and lowered his voice, instinctive adaptation to a world with ears; “He deserved it, Scully. Tell me that’s not the truth.”

“I didn’t kill him because he deserved it. I killed him because I wanted him dead.”

“So you should have.”

“Who are you and I to make that judgement?” Mulder’s panic at seeing her with the knife had jolted her from a non-verbal coma. “Vigilantism is a slippery slope. What makes us more capable of extricating our biases from our own notions of justice than any other armed adult with a vendetta and righteous bent?”

“We have each other to hold accountable.”

“Mulder, if anything, you and I blind each other’s judgement significantly.”

“No, no, I- I don’t think that’s true,” he insisted honestly, moving closer again. With his hair mussed and down that way and his fugitive stubble, he looked years younger, trustworthy, impassioned. He pled his case. “When have we ever prioritised ease or desire or TLC over the truth? We keep each other honest. Scully, how many times have you covered for me because you believed my means were justified by a beneficent end? How many omissions have you allowed on official reports? Without hesitation. Just because I’ve never had cause to return the favour doesn’t mean I wouldn’t, and now I have. I don’t judge you for what you’ve done at all, I understand it.”

Scully let out a sorry breath. It was her gallows laugh. The tap was dripping and the kitchen light buzzed unreliably. Better than being at home.

“Mulder, I appreciate that, I do,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “But there are more judgements than yours or mine or the law’s. Higher judgements…”

“Whose? God’s?”

She pushed off from the counter and paced the kitchen, a refugee from his sympathetic green eye. The tiles were sticky and cold.

“From a deontological viewpoint,” she said, hurriedly, “I don’t know where I stand for what I’ve done. I don’t know if I even believe that Judgement is deontological, actually. I believe it’s based on what’s in your heart, the intention behind your actions - but Mulder-” She stopped pacing, met him head on, confessing. “There was nothing in my heart when I killed Donald Pfaster except hatred and unbidden rage.”

As ever, Mulder nodded, took her in, turned her around in the desperate alchemy of his mind, reworking the facts as his innocence beckoned him so. He had that look of quiet appeal on his face, the little boy eyebrows and the etch of terminal kindness.

“Your beliefs tell you that we’re built in God’s image, don’t they?” he asked. He walked to meet her where she stood under the strained kitchen light, cautiously, like approaching a wild animal. “In the scriptures, God acts upon divine and righteous wrath, as do, it follows, his vicegerents down on Earth.”

There were bags under his eyes, wrinkles in his brow. He was heavier than he used to be. He was large, he took up space, and he moved that space towards her. She kept her hands to herself, strapped across her chest straitjacket-like.

“You said yourself, only nutbags believe that.”

“Listen.” Mulder made first contact, a firm hand on her wrist. He brought her wrist towards him, ran his palm up and down her pale arm and worked on her with those boy-sincere eyes. “Whatever you may believe heaven has in store for you, it can’t be proven. There is something I know for certain, though, and it’s the fact that Donald Pfaster will never harm, touch, or look at another woman or child again.” He brought her hand to his chest, testifying. “There’s no devil in you, Scully. There’s something worse; a regular old human being. You got through alive. I don’t wanna hear about the alternatives.”

The carpet smelled of choking vacuums, sebaceous excretions, and they were in god knows where at god knows what time in the night. Like an arrow, grief arrived and Scully gave a staggered sob, planting right into him. He wrapped her up with broken-dam ferocity.

She said what she had been thinking: “Maybe it’s a good thing I lost the baby.”

He tightened, shook his head, said, “Don’t,” but she knew he could not disagree.

Now that they were touching again after what felt like so long they could not bring themselves to stop. Suddenly, she was inhaling his sternum, suddenly, tasting his neck. Reaching up around him, and his grid-lock, grasping embrace bordered on painful. They were breathing hard before they even found each other’s mouths. Then they were in her bed and hurrying, ridding themselves of every barrier like an anxious man choked on his tie, desperate to anastomose, reverse engineer meiosis, graft themselves to each other and never again be at risk of separation.

There was no purpose behind it, no unspoken hope for fecundity, just selfish reintegration. Enough with sainthood. Enough with the angelic haunt. There was no heroism or villainy, only the frightening struggle to be good and the shifting, obscured face of evil alluring. If they were just animals, let them act the part. They had violent impulses. She tore at him and he showed her their flesh was the same. They ended up on the floor as they had done before out in the white ice - as little as possible between them and the core of the Earth.

-

Mulder, too, had someone to bury. This grave was half the size. He’d spent two-thirds of his life trying to fit himself in that shallow mound. Two decades of fruitless contortion in the hopes that if his body filled the space, no other tenant’s could. There was no exchange. If we bury our dead alive, the difficulty is in bringing ourselves to bury the dead at all. He was sweating, grunting, trying to force his body into that hole six feet down every day of his life.

And every day of his life he was waiting for a thud or cry for help from his mother to soar above the muffled shouting across the hall at midnight, convinced that all this could end only in divorce or a funeral. Every day of his life, he was listening to the sound of metal cluttering as a cutlery drawer opened slowly downstairs. Every day of his life he was holding his breath, feeling sick as he forced himself to check on his mother standing in that kitchen with the water running, as he called out for a response when she stayed in the bathroom too long. Every day of his life he was sitting at the threshold of his mother’s bedroom, barred from entering but too afraid to leave her alone, listening to her say, “You’re only thirteen, you don’t understand.” Every day of his life her face was twisted and grey as she wept abruptly, “Fox, I don’t understand anything.” Every day of his life he thought, _We can’t go on like this._

The worst night of his life spanned a quarter of a century.

*

Maybe airplanes were polluting the ozone overhead, maybe it was a spaceship coming on down to catch the Super Bowl. Maybe that droning was Scully.

The words came in radio pulse waves. Personalising…Piller…Pied Piper…painful for me too. A lot of P’s.

Where were they? A sleazy motel a few miles down from April Air Force Base. Some people bought holiday homes and a cutie Schnauzer. They had the highway blues and bed mites. He inspected the black growth decorating the ceiling cornice just above and to the left of the blurred, gesturing Scully-esque thing before him.

“Mulder, are you listening to me?”

He redirected his gaze lazily.

“No.”

To her credit, she allowed only an expression of sympathy into her doctor’s sigh. There were miners in his head tunnelling and there was a canary gone cold. Scully approached him and he felt the air in him go empty the way there was silence in the instant before a radiation mushroom.

“Mulder, you have been holding onto grief for so long-”

“Grief is all I have left!” he ruptured, and he relished the sting of the momentary fear in her eyes at the way he’d thrown her off his person. He stalked across the room, tugging at the length of rope lassoed around his neck all the time. “Of course I’m holding on to it, of course I never took any advice from any of my mandated child fucking psychiatrists growing up trying to spout me some herbal cocktail about PTSD and reframing loss and the benefit of forgetting the worse things. Are you kidding me? I hold that shit tight, I hold it like if I let go I’ll die. It was all I had to remind me of- I forgot! I forgot what it was like some nights to have someone care that I was alive. And then I’d remember my sister, and that was all I had left. I was just a kid then. Even now. For a lifetime, Scully, I don’t know how long. You-you don’t understand.” He couldn’t think. “I’m going to find Piller. Do what you want. Go back to Washington.” 

He grabbed a leather jacket off some chair, it might have been her jacket, it might have been her chair and her room, who knew? Either way, he was out the door, walking into that same old empty kid’s room no matter how many doors he ran through.

*

The moon rose on the endless night of space. The stars came out to play light.

Well, there she was. Twenty long years and she was only fourteen. She looked just like him but happy. He wanted to say, _Do you remember me, Sam? I’ve waited so long to see you._ But he was crumpling under some weight. He felt her drawing away. It wasn’t enough. He tried crushing her into his skin. She slipped through, took his face in her little hands, and he knew their time was closing. _Wait_ , he wanted to say, but he loved her more than he knew. A second goodbye stole along like the sun rising and blotting out dark. He was too relieved to know to panic, too incredulous to think to resist, but he knew. Just another moment. She smiled. They remembered each other so well. He raised his hands to capture her face. Again, he was left behind.

*

On a torrent of bedsheets communally desecrated by the fluids of the highway hitch world, Mulder lay with his chest between Scully’s thighs and his head on her breast. She stroked his hair steadily. She was strapped onto his back like a survival pack. He kept her calves looped over his abdomen and closed his eyes against her nails in his scalp, dissociating.

An hour earlier, she had driven him to the motel. She had unlocked the truth, she had taken the blow, she had made every leap of faith for him and lugged him on through to the end. Then she had let him soak her dress shirt and keep the lights off, let him rumple her clothes in his hands and put his weight on her lumbar back-bend.

Scully had a sharp little frown. Her eyes were always heavy on him, scanning, absorbing, but her hands were always so light. He searched her face for the truth.

“Can you believe I have no family left? That’s it. I’m the last one alive.”

“I love you,” she said. “You can have me.”

*

He got it, finally. In all honesty, he had only been on board with Brady Bunch replicating because he would give anything to that tiny woman. But the California sun rose kindly on the pale slope of her back, she had her face mashed into the pillow, belly-down, and one arm and leg draped hungrily across him. She was brilliant that way in her sleep; shameless, greedy, undisturbed by the end of the world, and it occurred to him that children would love them like that.

It occurred to him that a child would be part Samantha. It occurred to him that children were the greatest act of hope, a way of communicating hope onwards. It occurred to him that a child would have Scully’s REM sleep rose flush. Back when they were still seeing Dr Parenti, he had slipped the man ten bucks at the end of their last consultation saying, “Do me a solid, doc, and pick the little embryos that look more like her.” Maybe he had known it then too.

But Scully had known it first. His old girl, always looking for proof of what she could not comprehend to be true. What better evidence of the intangible sanctity of human loyalty than the chromosome vow of a child?

Love, like all things, could not be destroyed. It only returned in different forms. Samantha transformed into old light and the old light illuminated Scully’s auburn splay beside him. Perhaps there was hope at the end of the road. Perhaps there were other roads he had never allowed himself to consider.

He woke Scully up with a nasal nudging and she feline-stretched over him, settling in more snugly, then slowly rising from slumber with a languid nuzzle of his chin, his cheekbone. She unspooled, twining with his torso and limbs. She energised at the pace of a sunbaking ectothermic. He honed her in with the Southern gift of gab and she pulled at his hair, tugging him back up, too tired for pyrotechnics. She barely opened her eyes the whole time, slipping over and under him as the crease in her brow concentrated languorously. He made her breaths become tufts, soft-falling footsteps, then a shadow of a hitch and they both spilled and sunk in, falling back asleep easily. There was a child on a beach somewhere carrying a fraction of all the people they’d lost. Miracle or no, Mulder was going to find him.


	22. It Seemed to Comprehend Us Back

If one could make believe that the cigarette smoke and the barrelling vapours of some malfunctioning station radiator and the pre-dawn fog so thick it had slunk down into the subterranean wormhole of Chicago Union Station were in fact clouds heralding the commanding entrance of a cross-country steam train, then perhaps the bone rumble and the ear grating screech and the huge hulking locomotive rest-stop might have transformed themselves into an image altogether grand and exciting.

Instead it was April 2000, six in the morning, bitterly cold, early Spring in Illinois. There were no steam trains anymore, and by Scully’s foot a rat frozen solid from the cold jumped alarmingly back into life at the sound of the grime buffed Amtrak screeching into the station and scampered away.

The two hour flight from Dulles to O’Hare had taken a bite out of her and she was looking to return the favour to Mulder as soon as she managed to find him again if only she could keep down her post-flight nausea. All in all, the idea of spending forty-six hours on a train heading right back to the city from whence Mulder had plucked her and stolen her away in his usual cryptic fashion was bordering on emetically unendurable, whether Mulder had supposedly secured them first class tickets on the government dime or not. She was so fatigued she had a headache, and she was colder than she was fatigued, and all the hunching up into herself from the cold was giving her a neck spasm, which only served to worsen her headache-cold-nausea-fatigue.

Like a true man in black, a Mulder apparition presented itself fluttering down through the smoke and fog bewinged by his coat, and this grim Transylvanian government drone raced along the steps towards her, a Styrofoam cup in each hand adding its meagre donation of steam to the surroundings. 

Scully opened her mouth to begin the day’s allotment of whining but Mulder caught her first complaint with a chaste, hasty peck on the lips and another on her cheek. He didn’t even stop moving, he just ushered her along and pushed one of the coffees into her hands and gave her an encouraging nod as he steered her towards the train doors, grabbing their overnight bags with his newly freed hand. They were technically on the job, and they didn’t kiss while they were on the job. She was so sufficiently stunned that she allowed him to corral her blindly.

The score of boarders joining them at this, the first stop, entered largely in coach. Mulder and Scully stepped right into the foremost passenger car. Two rows of cobalt vinyls seats, roomily spaced. It smelt like freshly cleaned carpet and immediately the sounds of the outside were muffled then mute. The high life; cleanliness and silence.

The back of Mulder’s big solemn head led her down through the empty aisles further towards the front of the train until they reached the conductor’s cabin. He knocked once, waited, raised his hand to knock again. A second later, and he would have been knocking on the blunt forehead of a military matron of a woman who appeared in brass buttoned uniform and a railway cap from behind the sliding door.

She was in her late fifties, steel grey bun and thickset, built like a freight train herself and with a hardboiled expression to match like she had a line of ancestors who were loan sharks in old Sicily. She gave them both a discerning once over, then scowled behind them and then turned and scowled behind herself covertly. Voice low and haggard with years of cigarette smoke, she said, “So, are you two the feds?”

“Uh, yes,” Mulder said, “We’re looking for the conductor. You know where we could find him?”

“You’re lookin’ right at him, big boy.”

Scully was slotted slightly behind Mulder in the tight aisle and she furtively pinched his elbow. Served him right.

“Apologies.” Mulder had a joke in his voice that was detectable only to Scully’s ear. “When I received your letter through the Bureau, I assumed Drew Costello was a man’s name.”

“You ever heard of Drew fuckin’ Barrymore, square head?”

Scully cleared her throat to stop a laugh. Drew shrugged her conductor’s coat, bristled, shook her head. Then she waved them both into her cabin and they squeezed by her before she slammed the door shut on their heels. 

“Look, I run a tight ship, so to speak,” she got to the point, flopping down in her swivel chair. Behind her were an array of controls and levers, some greased by use, others dusty with negligence. Scully considered the difference between “tight ship” as according to her father and as according to Ms Drew Woman’s Name. “That is, if a train were a ship, you understand?”

Scully left the nodding to Mulder. If she made any sudden movements with her head, she suspected she would hurl. She sipped self-destructively at her Styrofoam coffee, knowing it would worsen the nausea but hoping against hope that it would alleviate the headache-fatigue.

“Now, we got forty-six hours on this train, two stops a day for twenty minutes each. Nobody gets on or off and I don’t know about it. Nobody moves through this train and I don’t know about it. I got the name and face of every engineer, attendant, brakeman, janitor, chef, and whatever else have you burned into the back of my eyes and I know where they should be and when they should be there and I don’t see how anyone – anyone! – could have thrown a passenger off this train a few minutes before dawn three trips in a row now like some sicko ritual. So what are you gonna do about it?”

“Thrown?” Scully piped in.

“What do you mean, ‘thrown?’” Drew’s face grew taut and glowed with an imminent rage. “Aren’t you two partners? Then how come you’re lookin’ at me like you don’t know what the fuck’s going on!”

Mulder was dependably and unhelpfully silent beside her. She knew he got a kick out of these moments when the case unravelled before Scully’s eyes in ‘real time’, as he liked to call it.

“I read over your case on the flight here. There was mention of passengers disappearing off the train and being found dead along the tracks as if they had jumped. But none of the autopsy reports showed evidence of a struggle indicating they had been thrown from the train by force.”

Drew rose, towering in her indignation like a stoked iron, sweating and quaking.

“Well I’m telling you now! They were thrown! And I told your partner already the same thing in my report! And don’t try and tell me otherwise because I know I’m right – just this morning I got a note stuck to my front window here that says next time it’s my body on the tracks. Whadya say to that, Cheeto?”

From her pocket, Drew produced a rumpled paper with the words, “THIS IS YOUR STOP,” scrawled in marker across pale yellow lines.

Scully ground her teeth and directed a glowering energy in the direction of her partner, who pointedly avoided her gaze.

“And you’re telling me they just jumped? Pff!” Drew scrunched the paper and tossed it in a bin under her control panel, dusting her hands and looking satisfied with the silence she had induced in her allies/foes. “Well hell to jumpin’, I don’t wanna go flyin’ whatever the bunjee fuck off this train before my time. So you don’t have two days, you have until dawn tomorrow. For this trip, you got free reign over my vehicle. Do whatever you gotta do.”

“Thank you. We’ll make sure you step off this train at the last stop with the rest of us,” Mulder said, offering an olive branch hand. Her edginess clearly being the result of underlying anxiety, Mulder’s typical easy manner worked to draw out a shudder of reassured breath from the worked up conductor. She shook his hand and softened reluctantly. 

“Well,” she said, readjusting her cap. “Better go have something to eat quick. Settle in, find a nice seat with a good mountain view. Two days don’t sound like much but some trips it feels endless. Then we get where we’re going and those mountains, they come and go quick. Like life, y’know. But, what am I sayin’? You got work to do and you’ll miss the whole thing.”

*

Scully felt wretched. It must have been the gelatinous egg in that breakfast muffin she’d allowed Mulder to feed her the morning before at work. He was making her put on weight recently, paying so much attention to which meals she did or didn’t eat. Or maybe it was the early morning flying and an old surge of plane phobia. Either way, if she didn’t find the nearest bathroom, she was afraid she’d be the first sailor’s daughter to fall subject to motion sickness after only five minutes of being on a moving train.

She hurried out of the dining cart and into a dark, narrow hall, against the maroon walls of which she pressed a hand to steady herself as she looked for a bathroom door. Eureka, she pushed one open.

Two pairs of eyes flashed at her, wide. The bodies to which they belonged were pressed together in the corner, wrestling, surrounded by store room equipment. It was hard to tell whether they were in the throes of passion or in the midst of a jagged fight. Scully stumbled backwards into the tight hall, a flush of sympathetic neural pathway cascades curing her nausea. A moment later a man emerged, then a younger woman, both in attendant uniform. The girl slipped off before Scully got a good look at her, but the man stayed, stopping a step away from Scully who was now pressed against the carriage wall.

He was in his thirties and had a face like a coal-worker scrubbed clean, hard and weathered, but he was as handsome and sturdy as an Olympian. A day or two ago, perhaps, he might have been cleanshaven. Just then, he was a regal shag of stubble and unruly black hair, and under the dim lights, his olive skin was golden brown. The ton of him swayed lightly at the behest of the speeding train. He had his waistcoat open, his first few shirt buttons undone, and beneath his uniform, there was a heftiness akin to assault. In his eyes, an echo, as though if Scully leaned in she might here a sound ringing around in the dark.

“This is a broom closet, staff only. Head back to your car,” he instructed, voice low over the constant rumble of the train.

Scully straightened up, she levelled him. When she didn’t move, a strange emotion briefly twisted his expression, bordering on confusion. Scully felt a light pressure at her temples, a heat in her abdomen. She was lightheaded, but she kept her gaze hard on him.

“Head back to your car, Miss,” he repeated.

“I’m looking for a washroom,” Scully held, sharp, not moving. “How about you tell me where I can find one.”

Again his expression flashed.

“Two doors down,” he said and, after watching her a moment longer, he went off in the opposite direction, rebuttoning his shirt. 

Scully relaxed against the wall, felt the pressure in her head release and the hot swell in her stomach subside. Then she went to the bathroom and splashed her face with water until there were curls at the front of her hair.

*

Mulder was still back in the general dining car, surveying the train populous from behind his menu like Johnny English. With a deliberate groan, Scully slumped herself across from him in the booth and snatched his menu.

“Poirot,” he greeted, knitting his fingers and leaning forward on his elbows with a doting expression. He had a drugged-up happiness about him lately she could not dent for the life of her, and she was glad, of course, to see that at the centre of him there was a nucleus of solidity and not – as she had feared at times – panic and incurable pain, and glad also that she had free licence to be sour and moody without fear of disturbing his unassailable contentment.

“If I’m Poirot, what does that make you?”

“Ms Marple,” he frowned. Obviously. “What are we eating?”

“Dramamine for me,” she said, grimacing at the menu listing of ‘Double Bacon Greasy Stack’ and pushing the laminated thing back in his direction.

“You alright there, sea legs? You look terrible.”

“Mulder. I’ll kill you.”

Under the table, his leg found hers and his hand slipped onto her knee. 

He leaned closer and said seriously, “Sick, I mean. You okay?”

She dropped the act and gave a few little nods, squeezing his hand and patting for him to let go. 

“We’re working,” she whispered.

She stopped herself short of glancing around self-consciously at the scanty audience of fellow diners, but she did keep her eyes down. Mulder released her and sat back, satisfied but regarding her a little more cautiously. Beyond the window to their left, already the rolling hills of Wisconsin countryside rose and fell into the agrarian patchwork distance, whizzing by.

“Mulder, why do I get the feeling you’re keeping a certain Modell-adjacent aspect of this case from me?”

He wiggled his eyebrows and opened his mouth to answer when they were interrupted by a waitress.

“Hi, what can I-”

The young woman stopped short as she and Scully recognised each other. The second pair of eyes in the broom closet. Nadya, according to her name tag.

She was beautiful in the way a late evening is beautiful, or dark chocolate or brown sugar or slow brook leading into a cave. Her hair was in a standard bun, thick and silky, deep brown. Her skin was the colour of amber honey, but her eyes, which were a few shades lighter than her skin, were most arresting – deep-set, grave, impatient, striking, lashes so long and lush she appeared to be wearing eyeliner when she was in fact bare faced. Her lips, even, were full and dark pink, and at that moment remained parted in transient shock at the small, clammy redhead appraising her from the booth. 

Nadya blinked and continued. To her credit, she remained outwardly unflustered. 

“What can I get you this morning?” She had a smooth, cursive accent, Arabic.

“Chocolate croissant for me and she’ll take a green tea.”

Nadya reached into a cart behind her and brought out a chocolatine for Mulder and a thermos of green tea for the teacup she placed before Scully.

“Sugar, if you need it,” she said, putting down a dispenser.

Scully spotted a black lump inside the glass container. 

“Oh. There’s a fly,” she said.

Nadya looked unperturbed when she discovered Scully was indeed correct. She simply opened her palm and shook out some sugar until the desiccated little fly fell out, then placed the dispenser back on the and walked off with a brisk smile and a perfunctory word of welcome.

Scully sat open mouthed. 

“Aw, don’t be so uppity,” Mulder laughed through a mouthful of pastry.

“Uppity? From Mr Martha’s Vineyard?”

“Hypochondriacal,” he shrugged.

“I’m a pathologist. My vision is like a blacklight.”

“Then you better keep those peepers away from my underwear drawer.”

She kicked him under the table, just lightly. He looked exceedingly pleased.

“I saw that woman, the waitress, when I went to go find a washroom earlier. She was slightly indisposed at the time.” Mulder nodded to acknowledge the information, preoccupied with his crumbling breakfast. “I walked into the wrong room and she was in there with a man - another member of the staff. They looked like they were getting a bit rough.”

Mulder gave her a look of piqued interest.

“In a bad way, Mulder,” she clarified. “He came out and spoke to me afterwards. Gave me a bad feeling.”

He studied her, paying attention now. The moment Mulder started paying attention, Scully always got the feeling she was falling behind. Already, she caught behind his unassuming hazel the leap and roll of a synapse gymnastic routine.

Before she could stop him, he was waving Nadya back over. She approached unhurriedly and in her whole demeanour there was a guarded, wary composition.

“Yeah?” she said, and then added, “Sir.”

“Sorry, my stomach is bigger than my eyes!” he explained with a charm so fake it was clearly intended to make Scully laugh. Naturally, she was frowning instead. “Can I get another look at the menu?”

Nadya, unimpressed, whipped one out for Mulder.

“Why don’t you just wait there while I make up my mind,” he said as Nadya turned to leave. Her lips flattened and she stood stiffly in place. Scully found her general air of grit and impatience attractive – something about her being so beautiful and so filled with either fear or a kind of deep hate.

She cut to the chase.

“Sorry about earlier, for walking in on you and…”

“My husband,” Nadya supplied curtly. She gave Scully a look as though by bringing it up she was violating a woman’s pact of silence. “That was my husband, Achilles.”

“Achilles,” echoed Mulder, examining the hot drinks column.

“It’s more common in Greece. His mother was from Crete.”

“And he’s a brakeman?” Scully asked, guessing from his build. This managed to take Nadya by surprise, though barely.

“He used to be. When he was much younger, in the old trains. Then he had an accident, and now he’s a sleeping car attendant.” Her expression remained taut. Scully sensed she did not hate them but that she was ashamed of Scully having witnessed her in a moment of fear, and she was protective of the same thing that made her afraid. That was something Scully could understand. “Are you ready to order?”

“Just a second,” Mulder said. He looked up then, just a glance, and then back down at the menu. “I like your earrings.”

Nadya remained unmoved, but Scully caught the signal and turned her attention to Nadya’s ears in closer detail. The earrings were unremarkable pearl studs, and there was nothing significant on the left side of her head which Scully could see, but as Nadya turned to retrieve Mulders final order of banana bread, Scully caught the beige crescent of a Cochlear implant behind her right ear. Again, she was seeing all the same things as Mulder but not making the same connections. They lived in different worlds, half-worlds, filling in the complementary blanks for each other every day.

“Do you mind if I ask what model implant they used for your ear?” she asked, trying to guess at what Mulder’s question might be.

Nadya shot her a narrow look.

“Are you two police or something?”

“I’m a medical doctor.”

“So what, then, FBI?”

Well, no one ever praised them for their acting capabilities. Perhaps the attire was a giveaway, but Mulder hadn’t suggested a need for anything other than her usual black pants and blue skivvy with a fitted blazer, and he himself was just in a suit. Hurriedly, they backtracked and Mulder apologised for keeping her. Nadya was off before he finished talking, leaving the dining car entirely and unclipping her hair just as she stepped through the door. It fell down around her shoulders thickly. She was gone.

Mulder jumped his eyebrows. 

“Touchy.”

“Very beautiful,” Scully said, absently.

Instead of agreeing, to her surprise, he looked a little jealous. 

“Well,” he said, standing and taking his banana bread to-go and gesturing for her to follow, “be that as it may, I think we just found Achilles’ very beautiful heel.”

-

The City of Stars received its fair share of groupies and dreamers. Respectable people took photos in front of mansions belonging to the Madonnas and Hugh Hefners of Sunset Boulevard, went name-spotting along the Hollywood walk of fame, stayed in nice hotels, got drunk, and made love like well-groomed movie stars.

Mulder and Scully were not respectable people. They dressed respectably, they earned respectable wages, and kept respectable homes. But beneath the cologne and bowtie, beneath the little black dress and the ribbon tied around neat red hair, Mulder and Scully were premier among the patrons of the city’s most esoteric hotspots, at home among all manner of bohemian eccentrics, hailing from far and wide, come to see or revisit the oddities on secret display in the nooks and crannies of a metropolis which otherwise shone under the stage lights of gleaming fame and fortune.

So they slipped from the red carpet of respectable money makers and went out on the town, feeling ordinary and pleasant and small in their unspecial freakishness.

Mulder had memorised the Lone Gunmen’s specially prepared guide to Hollywood’s “hip underground” and he escorted Scully through an empty laundromat glowing in the night, out the back into an unlit alleyway, through a loose slat on a boarded boundary fence and down what, at first, appeared to be an out of place manhole which then opened to reveal a (literally) underground jazz club, lit by sconces and carpeted in a deep royal red and suffused with the slow melodies of something like Naima by John Coltrane, like a scene out of Goodfellas or a young writer’s dream. Only the patrons were no slick Ray Liotta types, but rather spiritual and social cousins of the Gunmen trio. Geeks who had united to create a underground safe space for convincing themselves they were suave. Upon closer inspection, the piano was playing automatically, and the trumpet player was a well-designed drone.

Among these, their own type, Mulder and Scully got fake drunk on milkshakes, Scully more convincingly. After a few sips, she was asking Mulder to ask her whether or not she could tie the stalk of a maraschino cherry with her tongue.

“Can you tie the stalk of a maraschino cherry with your tongue?” he asked, leaning so far over the small table his lips were brushing her ear. They were intoxicated on the low lighting and each other’s Bureau-funded attractiveness and the distance between them and their everyday lives. Her eyes glittered dangerously, the way they had in the year they’d first met, when she had been dirty and young and cheeky.

She plucked the cherry, so translucent it almost glowed, right off the whipped cream cone on her shake and popped it in her brazen mouth. Then, with a girly flourish, she presented the stalk in a knot.

She was a college girl. She was ridiculous. She had a grin on her dare of a face. A few jokes slurred through his mind having something to do with sailor’s knots and being a daddy’s girl but she was eyeing his lips shamelessly, sitting up against him, and he wanted to eat her alive.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and then he kissed her to make his point, and she opened her mouth to make hers.

Then they were out, but they got distracted on their way to finding a cab and ended up somehow in a an antique store that sold only items haunted by the dead. Scully bought a hairpin possessed by the ghost of a baroness whose throat had been slit with a very sharp toothpick by a rather resentful chauffer. It cost ten cents and she made Mulder wear it. She stepped back to admire him, then tugged him behind a shelf to stand on tiptoe and give his chin a devilish lick, then she was pulling him out of the store.

Finally, they really were in a cab and heading towards their hotel. Scully was telling him about a student peer she’d known in medical school who wanted more than anything to be a cardiothoracic surgeon. One day in theatres, while he was assisting a consultant in a double bypass, an eyelash got stuck in his eye and – being scrubbed into sterile gowns and his hands otherwise drenched in the patient’s blood – he’d had to endure two hours of excruciating eyelash stinging, so that by the time they were closing the big fella up, the student had tears pouring all down his face.

“He showed up the next week with every last one of his eye lashes lasered right off,” Scully informed him, undoing his bowtie in the back seat. She was probably making the whole thing up. He didn’t care. He was busy with the slope of her neck and she tasted like nectarine and pink salt.

In their room – his room, according to the Bureau – she was barefoot on the bed and the radio channel on their hotel TV was playing Donny Hathway and Mulder was standing below her, hands bracketing her waist as she mouthed along to Donny singing, _I love you. More than you’ll ever know,_ her hands snaking into his hair, for him, all for him, prim and proper and violent and calm and in a little black dress standing on a white mattress – for him. He buried his face in her stomach, slid down until he was below her navel and she was pressing him in tight, tensing and wanting and letting him know. She was his man, she was the woman of his whole life. What legacy? What moment or cause beyond this? They were young, together, alive. He shoved her lightly back onto the bed and she received him, eyes dancing, seductive, laying her love on the line.

-

A few months later, and they were cramped together, sat on the bottom bunk in a first class Amtrak roomette, the mountainous night of the corner of North Dakota rushing by in the blackness beyond their window. One day down. They only had until dawn.

After a long day spent investigating every member of staff and surveying the ins and outs of the train, all they had learnt was that, during the accident years ago which had resulted in Achilles’ career change from a brakeman to the more hospitality-oriented work indoors, his mother had been tragically killed. A freak explosion in a storage car she was cleaning out at the end of a route. The train had skipped a rest stop because they were running behind time, the bearing overheated – smoke, dust, eruptive fire. Achilles was blown black through an open door into the adjacent car and his mother was burned up alive. All this from the resident gossip and chef of the train who happened to know Achilles from their old employment.

But this had led them nowhere. There they were, squeezed in a sleeper car room, still stuck on debating the question of there being a killer at all. Mulder, naturally, had meanwhile already settled on Achilles as their guy.

“Achilles Cirillo,” Scully said with finality, “from the evidence we have, is guilty of nothing more than being a detestable brute. In fact, from the evidence we have, no one on this train is guilty of anything more than being as miserable as your average Amtrak train staff. The note on the conductor’s window could have easily been an empty threat from any of her many justifiably spiteful subordinates. I have gone over the reports several times already, I have inspected the train from the first car to the last, and I don’t see how anyone could have snuck into first class without being seen by either a passenger or another member of crew, and then proceeded to calmly, silently, and without force, compel someone to either squeeze themselves out the window or head to the front of the train and jump off.”

“Three Empire Builder trips in a row?” Mulder persisted. He was hunched over so as not to bump his head on the upper bunk, and his five o’clock shadow had officially matured into an eight or nine, face inexpressive and thinking.

She flopped back onto the bed, legs still dangling off the side. Her joints were aching and her nausea was long gone but she was tired beyond rational thinking and said simply, “We live in difficult times.” 

Mulder flopped down beside her and swung one of his legs around hers. He reached with his closest hand to massage her scalp, arm bent at an awkward angle, clearly buttering her up for his impending loon’s rave.

“Don’t you find it strange, Scully, that all three of the dead are women? Men are far more likely than women to choose violent methods of suicide like a gun or jumping from fast-moving train.”

“More likely does not equal certainty. We’re judging from a small sample size. And how do you explain the lack of force?”

“Well, you said yourself, earlier – there’s something Modell-adjacent in this case, though not quite the same. The killer is targeting only women, for starters, and for another thing, he clearly seems to be working his way up to the conductor, as though the first three times were just rehearsals. Culture is littered with all kinds of gender-specific reports of compulsion. Most just happen to be women luring men to their deaths – sirens, the Brazillian encantado. In Greek mythology, you have Peitho, the goddess of persuasion and seduction, or Bia, the personification of force. And then all throughout literature, you have characters reflecting historic cultural beliefs in special individuals with the ability to control minds, famously so in the case of Dracula or the Purple Man-”

“The Purple Man?! As in Zebediah Kilgrave?” Scully propped herself up on an elbow and Mulder followed suit, making the flimsy cot bounce, giving her an innocently ingratiating look.

“Say Zebediah again.”

“Mulder, have we sunk to the point of using Marvel Comics as supporting evidence?”

He turned the sides of his mouth down and fiddled with her shirt collar sheepishly.

“I was banking on you not getting that reference.”

“Charlie used to read Daredevil comics. He’d smuggle them into the house. My father thought they were violent and crass and, most of all, blasphemous.”

“And you liked them?”

“No, I stole them from Charlie just to see what made them so scandalous. I wasn’t impressed then and I’m not impressed now. Mulder, why would someone who can control people – specifically women – with his mind or his voice or whatever it may be, have to tussle with his wife in a broom closet? Why would he have to tussle with her at all? Wouldn’t she be helplessly pliant, and wouldn’t a man like that take full advantage of his capabilities?”

Mulder was serious now, engaged. He knew he had her curiosity, her indignation, and as usual he spun it on his finger like a centrifuge ring.

“Say it is Achilles. Say in his youth as a brakeman, during the accident that killed his mother, some extreme psychological stimulus causes a rift so deep he slowly discovers the ability to project his intentions – on women in particular, for whatever Freudian reason. He becomes an attendant. He meets Nadya and finds her miraculously immune. Why?”

Scully resented herself for her own understanding.

“The hearing aids,” she supplied, reluctantly.

“Bingo!” he said, and risked his life by tapping her once on the nose. Her eyes narrowed but she did not pounce. “The hearing aids. His powers of persuasion are dampened because they cannot be properly heard. Forbidden fruit, they fall in love, they get married, something sets Achilles off on a path for revenge for what happened to his mother years ago which, somehow, clearly involves Drew Costello, and then you and I step onto the scene.”

Scully sighed, resigning. She could feel the bags under her eyes, every fibre of muscle in her gastrocnemius. She closed her lids for a moment, a teaser of sleep, and when she opened them again, Mulder’s expression was sympathetic. He ran the back of his hand up from between her collar to the curve of her chin. He ran a thumb under her eyes, over her brow, lightly massaging.

“We have until dawn,” he reminded her, gently. He had his own wrinkles, and she was growing fond of them. Age softened him, made him more substantial. When he had been smooth and bright in the years they’d first met, if she had put her hand through him, he would have shimmered hollowly in the light. “Then you and I can go home and take a proper holiday. Costello was right. We work. We miss the whole thing.”

She breathed out, weary, wanting to believe him.

“I have two problems with your theory, Mulder,” she said, after allowing his proposition to assuage her briefly. If he was trying for her, she’d try too. “The first is that I have spoken to Achilles. He instructed me very clearly to leave the car I was in, and I stayed. And the second is that, even if I happen to be some kind of anomaly and even if you are somehow completely right, we still have nothing to go on for an arrest before six in the morning.”

“He gave you a command?” Mulder asked, frowning into a snag. “How did it feel?”

“It felt…like nothing, Mulder” she said, toning down her exasperation as best as she could manage. “I was nauseous at the time. All I could think about was the pressure in my head and stomach.”

Suddenly, Scully had the same feeling she’d had in the dining car when Mulder had seen Nadya’s earrings: failing to keep up. He was studying her with a blank intensity, holding his cards to his chest. His gaze dropped to her stomach, then back up to her eyes, searching, carrying a question he then dismissed with an almost imperceptible shake.

“I, uh, I don’t know,” he said, and added a non-committal comment about perhaps her implant interfering with Achilles’ influence. Then he sat up and, throwing her a hand, hauled her to a standing position next to him in the cramped unlit room. “But the second problem happens to be just what we’re getting paid for. What do you say to a little late night sleuthing, Nancy Drew?” 

She said nothing, but she followed him anyway.

They made a plan, slipped into the dark hallway, moving, as always, against the grain, against the gliding interstate blur, heading deeper into the gloom, illuminated only by the rural lamplessness of the valleys and rocky, pine covered terrain of far east Montana sweeping on outside the windows. They moved quietly, together. The tracks rattled faintly. Many of the rooms were empty, open, filled with unpaid silence. They kept their hands on their guns.

A figure stepped out from the dark. The sound of metal impacting skull-flesh, bodies crumpling, then nothing but the rush of the train.

-

For a moment, he thought they were back in the ice. The darkness, the cold, a sharp pain banding his head, and beyond the four walls, only wind and breakneck silence.

He jolted upright. Scully.

She was slumped beside him. There was a little light filtering in from some unseen cranny and it was enough to recognise the black sheen of blood sticky and warm across the smooth plane of her temple. The two of them were bound, hands behind their backs, ankles tied, thrown into the corner of a storage car so black it was blue in the night. Around them were crates rattling and swaying, and beneath them, the chill of the metal car floor.

Scully groaned and raised her head slowly, face contorted in pain and disorientation. Then her eyes flew open in a double take as she reached the same conclusion as he had, a few seconds delayed. Their eyes found each other in the dark, white, confirming. 

He couldn’t put his hand to her face, couldn’t put his arms around her or even feign some kind of medical concern as an excuse for touching her skin to self-calm. Instead, he lowered his head in signal. She met him, understanding, and they pressed brow to brow.

“You’re okay?” he asked, pointlessly. She nodded against him, breath coming harder with panic, but her expression steely as she pulled back even beneath the shards of hair stuck across her pale face.

“Are you both alright?” came a hesitant voice from across the carriage. He and Scully spun in synchrony to face it. Nadya leaned forward from where she sat in the opposite corner, concealed by shadow. She was still in her uniform. She looked haggard, exhausted, unharmed.

“Nadya,” Mulder said carefully, feeling Scully thrumming beside him, “what time is it?”

“It’s too late,” the young woman informed him, numbly. She remained where she was, crouched as they were on the floor, but completely unbound.

“Nadya, you need to untie us.” Scully took her turn speaking. Calm, forceful. Her voice, to only his ears, carried an unwell twinge. “We’re federal agents. We have reason to believe your husband may be about to endanger the life of the conductor.”

“I said you’re too late.” She seemed truly sorry. “He’s already on his way to Costello’s office.”

“You can untie us and you won’t be implicated in the actions of your husband. It’s your choice,” he said.

Nadya’s expression flashed with something like disgust.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him.

“Explain it to me.”

She was playing with a scrap of wood which had splintered off one of the many crates towering around her. Beside him, Mulder felt Scully wriggling against her ties, working, as she was always working, undeterrably surviving.

“I can’t help you,” Nadya went on, watching her two hands. “I don’t have a choice. You don’t know.”

“I know what he is,” Mulder said firmly. Nadya looked at him then, doubting. “I know what he does. I know he can’t control you even if he wants to.”

She touched her hearing aid, believing his honesty.

“No,” was all she could respond. “You don’t know.”

Mulder summoned something within himself, something he had learned from Scully, who continued to struggle behind him, tiring. 

“I do know,” he said, “that no one can take away your free will. You can let us go right now, Nadya, and we can help you. No matter what Achilles says he has in store for you. We are what we choose to be, what we choose to do - the right thing, or the wrong. Help us.”

“Easy for you to say.” She was angry now and her bright eyes luminesced. “What has it ever cost you? A few bullets, a few hours of extra paper work? Maybe you have had tough times. To you, this is bad, no? To me, it is the best I have had in years. I don’t have to love him. That’s why he loves me. I get to choose.” Nadya looked at Scully, then back to Mulder. “Maybe that’s something you understand.”

“You’re in a bad situation, Nadya. We can help you if you help us. I know you feel this is your only option but there is something greater than love: hope. Even when you feel love is slipping, believe me, hope remains.”

“Then I really have nothing,” she said, and he felt her sincerity even across the cold space. “Mine dried up years ago. My hands are empty.”

“No they aren’t. I have hope for you too.”

Nadya froze, her gaze open, desperate momentarily, caught by the truth in his eyes. Then she let her head fall and she wept. The way a person can endure dry-eyed for years until hearing the voice of a friend. 

To his right, Scully sounded quietly sick, like she might throw up; he had acquainted himself with that kind of breathing in the long months of her cancer. Urgency tugged at his heels. Mulder called out to Nadya carefully.

“Please, untie us. My partner isn’t well,” Mulder said calmy. Scully was leaning against him, and her heaves slowed as she eased the tension in her body and breathed in the make-shift paper bag of his arm and shirt-sleeve. He felt her breath hot and shaky and he kept his gaze trained on Nadya, beseeching. The young woman studied him, eyes wet. She was on the verge of defecting.

“You remind me of my father,” she said faintly. “He was a good man. We came from Syria when I was eleven. We had nothing, but every Sunday night he would polish my school shoes so I could feel clean. And I used to take the shoes off as soon as left the house because no one else at school wore them and I would put on my fake Nikes instead.” Nadya stood and walked slow towards him. Yes, he had her. Mulder held his breath. Scully was silent, listening and waiting. Reaching them, Nadya crouched down a few feet away, a millimetre from deciding. She said, “He left us when I was still young. My mother forced him to. She was afraid of him, I don’t know why. I only remember him with my school shoes at the front door, polishing. If he saw me now he would weep. Or maybe he was a bad man and that’s why I’m like this and I just don’t remember.”

The psychologist in him weighed his next words carefully.

“With parents, isn’t the truth always both things?”

Nadya laughed sorrowfully. Scully was right; she was beautiful.

Sobering, she asked, “Do you have children?” 

Knowing Scully would hear him, he paused before answering, “One day,” and meant it. Beside him, Scully turned her face away.

Seeing this, something seemed to change in Nadya – not a snap but a soft break, a tear of fabric already thinned. With sudden haste and determination, with palpable and abject fear, she began to untie him. Mulder jumped up the moment his wrist and ankles were free, rubbing his joints.

“He locked the doors to this car from the outside. You have to pop open the roof and climb along the top of the train,” Nadya instructed, starting on Scully. So that was how Achilles got around without being seen.

Freed, Scully jumped up and began helping Mulder stack storage crates beneath the roof hatch. Nadya grabbed Scully by the arm.

“You can’t go!” she insisted, and her beauty blazed with panic, wild and alarming. “He’ll control you, you won’t be able to help yourself.”

“It doesn’t work on me either,” Scully said briskly, shaking her off. But Mulder touched her shoulder, gave her a look, turning a suspicion he could not name over and over in his mind.

“Stay,” he said. She frowned sharp, surprised, struggling against a fighter’s instinct until the earnestness of the fear he could not disclose seemed to register faintly with her and she resigned to trust him, unquestioning.

He climbed the crate ladder alone, roared as he pushed open the hatch, and, having flashbacks to another train, another forest green blur of a landscape years ago, hauled himself up onto the roof of the locomotive, leaving Scully and Nadya down below, hearing only the send-off cheer saying, “If you hurry – there might be enough time!”

The night was glowing navy and the train was black and moving. Above him, a spray of stars navigating for the ancients, old souls watching him scurry in the freezing speed gale. He scurried like a wind-rat, all fours along the train. He was atop a midway storage car. Air pummelled through his long limbs, threatening to peel and lift him away, toss him into the racing treescape. A mosquito against the windshield of a heavy, juniper pine. The moon was half full and glowing.

One car ahead, Mulder saw another larger figure climb from a hatch onto the roof of the train. Achilles froze in silhouette at the sight of him, only a few yards away, and in a flash, jumped up and began running along the roof and leaping from car to car like a chimp in a jungle of trains.

Mulder, in a fit of necessary insanity, stood and began running in pursuit, relying on pure adrenaline and a complete and total lack of margin for error to keep him from slipping and ending up as a pole of flesh wrapped around an old tree.

He made his second leap across carriages, catching up. Achilles may have been competent, but Mulder had outrun horses in his prime. When the man was in reach, Mulder grabbed him and they fell forward, flat and both shouting out on the roof of the second-to last car. Achilles thrashed against him. He was huge, powered by manic anxiety – not rage. There was an animal terror in his kicking and bucking. His black hair flew about him in a thunderous, Baroque way and Mulder had him almost pinned to the roof when the man’s ebony eyes flashed with a savage panic and he cried out and threw Mulder off to the side.

Without thinking, Mulder grabbed onto a rail. The rest of him dangled a few feet from one-hundred-fifty miles-per-hour of certain, pebbly death. The air was so cold and so fast, it paper-cut his bare skin. Mulder hardly noticed, seeing only the towering body of Achilles appearing above him, foot raised above Mulder’s white-knuckled hands, poised to send him slipping. 

A shot rang out in the mountainous dark and he knew. Scully had come save him.

-

Weeks earlier, the choices stacked up. An old kick, mutiny, sent Scully on a quest for self-proof. Her car smelt of burned nicotine and the grey man playing god in her passenger seat steered her towards Calico Cove, where Scully carried a scorpion across a lake on her back. He stung her, and she limped but did not drown. She was used to poison in her skin.

The second deal with a devil of her lifetime. The third time she had forsaken Mulder for another man. This time, as with the others before it, Mulder’s silence delivered judgement. She was ashamed. She was ashamed of having worn his costume poorly, of having not told the truth, of having failed where he would always succeed, at having been touched by that old man again.

Scully sat on the pillory of his couch, kept her head bowed, bore Mulder’s pacing, his harsh looks, and worse, his refusal to look at her at all, even harshly. She would have preferred reprimand to his shun, though she deserved the latter wholly. All the while, her skin sunk and dissolved in the places where that tarry man had touched her and the tunnelling kernel of shame made a home in her where it had grown and rested all these years. Only when she could not bear it any longer did she say, “He drugged me, Mulder. He undressed me while I was asleep.” 

As she knew it would, that stopped him. As she knew it would, that tossed his righteous hypocrisy to the side.

He was all around her, sheltering, cleaning, purifying, forgiving, but not touching. He kept his hands off her, waited for her to scrub herself raw in the shower, gave her his clothes, and slept on top of the covers, around her, acting as a human bunker, weighing her down and closing her off from the intrusive world, leaving only an air hole to breathe, but not taking – never taking anything in return. Trying, as he had in the ice, to give her back the pieces of herself, almost succeeding.

Choice after choice. The same choice. Over and over again. Was it a choice at all if there was never any other she could have made in reality?

It was seeing Daniel that finally brought her hurtling back into her body again. The skin on his hand was the skin that had known her years ago, in a different body, one that had never been desecrated. He still gazed upon her like some magnificent, young, spirit thing. Blue eyes, like hers, but cryopreserved in a time before so many things had been altered irreversibly. So long, she had forgotten. Forgotten what it was like to be loved by a man who had no idea what the truth of her was and didn’t care or notice. She loved him in an old way too, but she stood and left him where he belonged.

_What if there was only one choice, and all the others were wrong? And there were signs along the way to pay attention to._

Maybe that was all there was. The choices made, and the next one ahead. Choosing the most honest thing.

Scully awoke on Mulder’s couch and allowed the tide of time to carry her into his room. She roused him with a hand on his face. His eyes were on her like air, clear, absorbing, seeing right through to the truth. Without speaking, she undressed and climbed in and she knew what she was doing. Her point of no return. When she lay beside him and guided his hand along her stomach, shivering, when she ran her thumb over the scar beneath his clavicle, when she brought his mouth to hers and kissed him, showing him what she would not let any other man see – it was a lifetime’s offer, this time without shame. She surrendered herself. Not with her body, but with her commitment, her future, honesty. She was above him and he was leaned against the headboard, arms supporting her back, accepting her offer humbly. The look on his sleep-softened face was open with admiration and free of expectation. The only man. He arced up and she struggled to regulate pace, summitting. A bolt, tightening. In their biologies, signalling pathways long deactivated were expressed and moved into place. They exchanged, paralysed, shot through with clarity. Something mighty took root.

Afterwards, Scully could not sleep. She lay awake beside him, feeling altered. The sun rose. She rose too and watched her lover as she dressed, and saw he was not her lover but her friend, so much like a boy when he was sleeping, but in all other hours of the day, a man, and a difficult man. There was a distance and difference between them that would never be crossed. She shrugged on her jacket and went for a walk, needing time.

In early morning Alexandria, commuters were impatient behind the wheels of average cars. Women pushed prams on the sidewalks and dogs chased the members of their human families, laughing. All this, surrender. But then perhaps surrender was not powerlessness.

It was true. Mulder was difficult, but he was always going to be difficult and she was always going to feel the urge of resistance. They were nothing alike, but what separated them joined them. The difficulty in knowing each other made their knowledge more true, and the truth was a face they had not shown or been able to show to anyone else before then, and in the act of searching, more than in the act of finding – in the act of knowing, more than in the act of communicating – there came a love and comprehension so rare it was nurtured in secret. Their dissimilarities made them allies, and their alliance made them friends, and the rest just could not be helped. They fell in love behind their own backs. That was her final choice.

She returned from her walk and he was still there, in her life, and in a sense he always had been.

*

Months later, on the train, a few minutes before dawn, Mulder ran the risk of being removed from her life permanently and smeared along the mouldy tracks of eastern Montana in the dark.

Scully held her gun in the air, her free hand on the rung of a ladder.

“Stop! Put your hands up!” she screamed. Nadya was on the ladder beside her. Scully had taken a page from Mulder’s book and taken to carrying around an ankle gun, which she had used to blow the locks off the storage car door. Then she and Nadya and had weaved their way through the train on ground level, broken open an emergency door at the sound of footsteps and struggle on the rooftop above them, and climbed the ladder on the side of the speeding train just in time to see Mulder a few metres to their left, clinging for his life.

Achilles was a mythic image. The moon burst with pallor behind him, illuminating his figure in a full-body halo. His hair whipped around his head in black flame, and his eyes were bewildered, impressive.

“Nadya, what have you done!” he roared, seeing her. His voice seemed to come from a place beyond him, from above, all around. Nadya climbed onto the roof and carefully, with terror, threw herself at Achilles’ side.

“Please, Achi,” she begged. “It’s all going wrong. Not today!” 

He seized her up with both hands, bending her like a reed, and his whole body flared with desperation.

“Why are you doing this to me?” There was genuine fear and heartbreak in his voice. 

“Achilles, step away,” Scully called out, her eyes trained on Mulder struggling to hold onto the rail, her weapon trained square in the centre of Achilles’ chest.

“Put your gun down,” he bellowed over the wind. Scully felt a swell of nausea retuning, a pressure in her skull, but she didn’t budge. Seeing her properly for the for the first time, Achilles seemed to recognise her. His face changed, and in a flash, he was barrelling away once more in the direction of the front of the train, this time dragging Nadya along with him.

Scully was on the roof of the train quickly, hauling Mulder to safety. He collapsed on top of her and for a moment they were both breathless, wordlessly checking in with each other, recuperating. Then they were up and in pursuit of the other pair.

Every jolt of the train over an uneven track sent all four adult scrambling down to all fours, and on one occasion, Scully’s gun slipped from her hand and ended up as lost railway debris, but they persisted, always moving, always running, always hounding for some terminal end thing.

At the conductor’s cabin car, Achilles, swung down the side of the train, hooking himself through an open window and reaching out an Olympus-born arm to pull Nadya down the same way. Mulder and Scully, glancing at each other and seeing no other option, hearts in their throats, did the same, somehow managing. Then all four of them were inside the conductor’s cabin, and Drew Costello was up, in uniform, with Achilles and Nadya behind her and a gun aimed straight at Mulder and Scully’s foreheads.

“Don’t let them come near us,” Achilles ordered. Again, his voice came from all directions.

He edged along the wall of the orange-lit cabin, his great arm hooked around Nadya’s neck, using her as a body-shield, a hostage. Drew Costello, beyond herself, pivoted to provide them with cover until Achilles was standing in front of the emergency door at the back corner of the cabin. Nadya was shaking in his arms, protesting and pleading, and her dark hair was strewn across the both of them wildly. Achilles broke the door latch and forced it open with a jolt. Ice air made a canon sound as the cabin depressurised and wind excavated the small cabin, blowing them all back and, a premonition of what they all understood to be the imminent death of at least one person in the room.

Drew was looking frantically between the gun and the agents, her eyes full of powerless apology.

“Put the gun down,” Mulder said calmly. He had stepped immediately in front of Scully, blocking her from barrel view.

“I can’t!”

“She can’t!” Achilles echoed. He was full of triumph and terror, his handsome face streaked with sweat and anxiety. Nadya had gone quieter in his grasp and seemed to be formulating urgently. “This time, she has to listen to me.”

“What are you talking about!” Costello half-shrieked. Her demeanour, previously solid and steely, had disintegrated. Her bun was frayed in grey wisps around her panicking face.

“Why didn’t you just do what I asked?” Achilles cried. His voice, otherworldly, was shearing with a childish refrain and Scully felt that the man was almost sobbing. His whole body trembled violently. “I begged you to slow the train down. I saw the smoke coming from the bearing. She died because of you and your greed!”

“You fucking idiot!” Costello screamed. “I loved your mother! Are you kidding me? I loved her! I had no choice, I was just an engineer then. The conductor, he- I was under pressure – I was under orders! If you blame me because you’re jealous of what you didn’t understand as a boy, of what your mother felt for me, I can’t help you. I would have done anything, but I had no choice, I didn’t know. When she died it killed me! Why do you think I hired you as soon as I saw you again last year, you fool, what the fuck are you doing?!”

“I don’t believe you,” Achilles responded weakly, and his voice was almost swallowed up by the wind.

“It’s true,” Costello said, urgently. The gun in her hand shook but remained on Mulder and Scully. “I had no choice. Believe me.”

There was a long silence. Only wind was howling. Achilles fell to his knees. The weight of him made the cabin shake and the fight was all gone.

“There is always a choice,” came another voice, finally. It was Nadya’s. She was kneeled beside Achilles and the look in her stunning light eyes was fierce. She seemed to absorb all that had left her husband so swiftly and was almost luminescent with the burden of love.

Scully felt Mulder tense before her, torn between hope and new threat. She forced Mulder aside so she could approach Nadya cautiously, taking only a step forwards. Costello still had the gun, and Achilles, watching his wife with new intensity, had not revoked his former command.

“Nadya, you’re right,” Scully said, knowing Achilles was no longer paying attention to anything beyond the dark woman attached to his side. “There is always a choice. You can stop this.”

The air outside was ferocious, and light doused the blur beyond the door in a silvering grey. Nadya’s hair blew across her eyes.

“Coercion is not love,” Scully said carefully.

Nadya smiled tragically, nodding. She gave an at-a-loss shrug and said, “Then why does it feels like the real thing?”

Scully knew that look. She knew what Nadya was thinking. The woman turned to her husband. Kneeled and entangled on the floor, a few inches from the open, rushing air, they locked eyes. Her hands were on his face, confirming, and his arms were holding her tight, sending her a message, a final compulsion meant for two.

Scully knew what they would do before they did it. She didn’t even have a chance to lunge to stop them or to scream. In unison, the couple pressed their foreheads together, then threw themselves from the train.

*

Mulder stayed true to his word. After the police questioning, after they had slipped away from the journalists and the anxious passengers and the train, he took her to the nearest airport and they flew to Quonochontaug.

If Skinner was trying to reach them, Scully didn’t care. She was in and out of sleep the whole way, lightly glued to Mulder’s arm.

They were always in motion, like that train. And even when the train came to a screeching halt in the wake of some new tragedy, they kept on. Driving, walking, flying, talking, keeping each other in view.

She awoke on the couch in his childhood summer home, his coat hung over her like a blanket. Mulder was sitting on the carpet below her, his back against the couch. It seemed strange, the mundane peace of awakening to find a figure slouched beyond the rim of the sofa, eating a yogurt tub and licking the back of the lid. She batted down the overwhelming urge to ask him, “How did you get into my house?” But this was his home, and he turned to her with quiet green eyes when he heard her thinking.

*

They spent the evening on the beach, alone. The white sand was silver and cool in the night and the ocean calm overwhelming. For the first time, Scully was serene in knowing that no matter how far she ran from the one place she was in, the curve of things would eventually lead her back to that very same spot in the sand, beside Mulder, lying atop a blanket in the feather sea wind.

“I saw this beach in a dream,” Mulder said. They were on their backs, facing the wide sky. She had her head on his shoulder. “And in that dream I saw something that explains why Achilles’ voice had no effect on you. Someone was offering you protection.”

Scully turned on her side. He was so strange to her, even now.

“Who did you see?”

He smiled. “If I tell you what I wished for, I’m afraid that it won’t come true.”

It was the same thing he’d said on his couch the day they’d lost track of the jinneyyah. Mulder had been sombre when she’d asked him back then, almost frowned, turning to look down at his hands. Then he had breathed a laugh, facing her as he sent reply with glitter eyes, and his small, comforting joy had found residence on Scully’s lips as well. Only that feeling, beyond her comprehension, had caught her quite unprepared, a thing for which she had no plans, not even proper name. What was the opposite of disaster? 

Recalling it then, lying beside him on the long, empty beach, Scully, in feline calm, closed her eyes against the breeze and something understated, ruinous, free, tore and flowed its way through her such that nothing could describe.

Mulder rolled and kissed her. Like always, Scully had the sensation of tom-boy rebellion, like she had dressed in scrappy costume, roughing it to keep up with the guys, then one day the leader of the gang had gone and kissed her behind a tree. Always that little question, that scruffy girl surprised at being seen. 

Meanwhile, the ocean crept up and away from them as they moved together on the sand, pleasantly chilled, completely ordinary and alone under the prayer of the moon.

No one knew. They scarcely knew it themselves, carrying on as comrades or work flirts most hours, save for the brief space time continuum warp that peeked through the lazy, oxytocin drunk gaze they lathered upon each other after the mighty throes in the quicksand of his bed or the siren’s cave of her own. Like the slat in a goat’s eye where light enters to illuminate light. They lost time together, whole hours, and came out with no conscious memory. If there was a universal invariant, it wasn’t time. It was something else they both knew. On that wide, empty beach, they considered the quasar grief of their past. They considered a happiness quark. Perhaps: a word on their lips. Perhaps, as they could attest, the world had seen stranger things.

Mulder pulled back, used a thumb to brush the hair from her face.

“Skinner called while you were asleep,” he said. The maverick in his eyes was laughing. “Apparently, the Bureau is blowing their tops over our recent spending.” 

Scully rolled her eyes and she too wanted to laugh, but she was heavy with tranquility and the weight of him around her.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

She put a hand on his wrist, lightly holding him in place.

“I was considering Nadya,” she said, “Achilles…Diana. Even Krump and Schnauzer, Fellig, Bruckman, Jerse. These people who always felt like they had no choice, and it ruined their lives. Looking back, Mulder, even to me, it all feels inevitable.”

Mulder nodded, absorbing. His hair was ruffled in the wind.

“The idea of fate is tempting,” he agreed. “It allows the surrender of responsibility, allows the connection of arbitrary dots.”

“But in the moment, is there ever any certainty? Whether or not by virtue of some of Schrodinger’s principle, fate is born from the slow and absolute elimination of all other possibilities, and we have to go on living ignorant, moment to moment, of all those other paths.”

“We will only ever make the choices we make,” Mulder finished for her, understanding, “but you and I chose blind and we still choose blind every day.” She bathed in his intelligence, his personalised telepathy.

“And it is always just as difficult,” she admitted. “There was no way I could have known where we were headed at the start.”

“I knew,” he said, and there was a prophetic glint in his eyes. She believed all kinds of magic about him.

“You knew?”

“Sure. I read it in a fortune cookie once.” She levelled him with a sceptical look, half-heartedly playing a familiar part. He moved his hand down her arm, dipped his head to brush her eyelids with his mouth. “And then I read it in your eyes one night in Bellefleur.” His hand found her wrist and brought her fingers to his chest. “And in your hands when I was on your bed, covered in my father’s blood.” He stooped to her neck. “And in your blood too many times.” And he read it all over her. She flushed under archive-weathered hands. The sand was cool and moulding, and the sea foamed as they mirrored the ebb and flow of the tide. Alone, they fell into some peace.

Seven years. That first night, unimaginably long ago, there had been no way of knowing. It seemed simple now. But then, in that nothing motel, there had been only the panelled light of the moon across the blue curve of his throat. There had been only hope, and her eyes, seeing and understanding.

\-----

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have so many people to thank.
> 
> To everyone who read and left feedback and encouragement - it meant so much to me.
> 
> Lily, for acting as my decision maker or sounding board or cheerleader depending on the order of the day. Amalia and Narelle for early direction. Blanca, for designing a cover picture simply plucked from my dreams.
> 
> To Tracy K. Smith for her poem, 'My God It's Full Stars,' the source of every chapter title and a lot of thematic guidance. On this note, I've drawn so much on inspiration from other writers on here - perhaps not in actual content, but in expanding the breadth of what I thought writing could be. 
> 
> And, most importantly, to all my good friends who, knowingly or unknowingly, moulded and transformed the way I looked at every aspect of these characters - traces of everyone I've come to know in the past few months are littered throughout this story and so it does not belong solely to me but to all of them, as it should. Thank you.


End file.
